April's recommendation: Sky Knife, by Marella Sands.
I've recently gone on a kick of trying to dig out fantasy written in unusual settings -- by which I mean fantasy that takes as its base something other than the common European cultural models. This has proved to be remarkably difficult, as apparently editors, believing there's not as large of a market for such things, are less inclined to publish them. They're probably right, but I'm doing what I can to counteract it: actively seeking out different kinds of fantasy, and now encouraging other people to do the same.
I picked up Sky Knife in the book room at ICFA. My copy is an advanced uncorrected proof, which means that there's almost nothing about it to catch my eye; all I saw was the spine with the title and author, and when I pulled it out, I found that the cover contained no other useful information. But "Sky Knife" sounded kind of Mesoamerican to me, so I flipped it open. On the second page I found the following:
I
WEST
Where Day Dies When It Is Old
9.0.0.0.0
8 Ahau 13 Ceh
Aw yeah. Any book that's giving its dates in the Long Count has my interest right off the bat.
Sky Knife is historical fantasy, I suppose, meaning that it's set in the middle of the Classic Period of the Maya (Tuesday, December 11th, 435 A.D., if this conversion is right), with magic operative in the world. It doesn't cover any specific historical event that I'm aware of, though. (I think Sands was just aiming for a Classic Period date that also happened to be the start of a new katun). It's set in Tikal, a major Mayan city, and the premise of the plot is that tremendous bad luck has begun to plague the city, and Sky Knife, the main character, has been tapped to find out why. From there the plot doesn't get all that much more complex, but this appears to be Sands' first novel, so I'll cut her a bit of slack.
What impresses me -- i.e. what prompted me to decide this was worth recommending -- is Sands' commitment to her setting. She does not skimp on detail, believe me. (Neither, I think, does she go overboard with it, but I've got a rather higher tolerance for foreign terms and concepts than most people -- plus some of this was already familiar to me.) Sands pays attention to Mayan culture in its religion, government, food, even clothing and body paint. I'm willing to forgive a certain thinness of plot, if the writer offers me this kind of depth of world.
And it is depth. Sands doesn't just toss all this out as exotic decoration, and then tell a standard story within it. You could not reset this novel in Europe and have it work. The main character is a temple attendant, and when we first meet him, he's helping hold down a man who's about to have his heart cut out. This is where I really respect what Sands is doing: she writes from within a viewpoint where that is not only okay, it's an integral part of keeping the world functioning as it should. And I think she finds a good balance point with it; that sacrifice we meet on page four is a volunteer, who goes willingly to his death, but at the last minute he's still afraid. Sands neither idealizes nor flinches from the implications of writing in this setting. She takes the Mayan worldview as a starting point, and then tells a story from within it. And this runs all the way through the book, right to the final confrontation and beyond. At the end, what powers that confrontation -- on both sides -- is human sacrifice. The difference between the good guys and the bad guys isn't, who did or did not kill for power; the difference is, whose victim was willing.
Anybody who's had a conversation with Ree lately can understand why I might find this to be timely reading. <g>
Sands has apparently written a sequel, Serpent and Storm, which takes our hero Sky Knife north to Teotihuacan. I hope to check that one out some time soon. In the meanwhile, if you're interested in reading something that has a noticeably different flavor from your usual bland quasi-European fantasy, give Sky Knife a shot.