Review: 'The Door on the Sea' (The Raven and the Eagle #1) by Caskey Russell
Pub. Date: 07/10/2025
Publisher: Rebellion; Solaris
To save his home, he'll have to leave it behind.
When Elān trapped a salmon-stealing raven in his cupboard, he never expected it would hold the key to saving his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders plaguing their shores. In exchange for its freedom, the raven offers a secret that can save Elān’s home: the Koosh have lost one of their most powerful weapons, and only the raven knows where it is.
Elān is tasked with captaining a canoe crewed by an unlikely team including a human bear-cousin, a massive wolf, and the endlessly vulgar raven. To retrieve the weapon, they will face stormy seas, cannibal giants and a changing world. But Elān is a storyteller, not a warrior.
As their world continues to fall to the Koosh, and alliances are challenged and broken, Elān must choose his role in his own epic story.
As someone who works with medieval literature I am a very big fan of how elements of oral storytelling are preserved in written works. In a lot of medieval texts you will still finds traces of orality and/or performance and I always enjoy picking up on those. I was reminded of this by The Door on the Sea, which very much retains a sense of orality. The narrative voice repeatedly jumps in to refer to what "we" might call certain things or to explain that of course we know these things already, etc. For readers less used to this, it will take some getting used to and it is also a difficult thing to nail as an author. I think it works really well in The Door on the Sea, once you get used to it. This sense of orality also pervades the plot itself, as the novel's protagonist, Elān, finds himself questioning the purpose of tradition. Just because things have always been this way, does it mean they have to stay that way? Just because these are the stories we tell, could we not try out new ones? And who do we give which roles in our stories?
We meet our protagonist Elān as he is being trained to be a teacher. It is not that he would really like to be a teacher, it is just that the path of warrior seems closed to him. Elān is unhappy with his life but not enough to really make a change. Until, that is, Raven flies into his home and reveals a big secret with which Elān might be able to save his people from the invading, shapeshifting Koosh. Elān is sent out on a secret mission alongside a set of warriors, a bear-cousin, a wolf, and the selfsame Raven. As they travel, Elān learns more about himself and the world and comes face to face with various dangers, including cannibal giants and the Koosh themselves. Will he be able to help save his people, or is he too much of a bookeater? In many ways I very much liked The Door on the Sea and much of it had to do with the tone I addressed above. On a plot-level, there is also a nice quest-structure to the whole book that propels it. We don't get a whole lot of insight into the characters themselves, however, only really into Elān, and even there it is thin. For readers who are more character than world or plot focused, this might be a hindrance to getting into the book. I did like Elān as a main character, but I have to admit that it took me a while to get a real idea of him. The surrounding characters are still quite vague, although I imagine the following books will expand on them. If you look up reviews for this book, you'll find quite a few commenting on the figure of Raven and his fondness for obscenities and being useless. I do agree that he gets a little tiring in the second half of the book, just because there isn't a whole lot of development there, but I do also appreciate what Russell is, I think, trying to do with this figure. He is more of a trickster figure, at once useless and crucial, the kind of figure you do find consistently in folklore and fables across the world. He is similar to Reynaerd the Fox in that way and it is a feature of the kind of story Russell is telling.
In his afterword, Caskey Russel explains that The Door on the Sea emerged from the stories he told his children about their Tlingit heritage after they had moved from Alaska to Aotearoa. He himself is an enrolled member of the Tlingit nation and his grandmother was a big inspiration for the book as well (see his Website). His love for Tlingit history, language, storytelling, and culture comes through really clearly in The Door on the Sea and this was one of my favourite aspects of the novel. So much modern Fantasy is reliant upon a vibes-based version of medieval Europe that is almost entirely stripped of the details that make such a setting fun. In his novel, Russell includes all kinds of details about his storyworld, inspired by the Tlingit nation, that make it a very rich reading experience. Because I am almost entirely new to Tlingit history, I really enjoyed this. However, as said earlier, the characterisation sometimes didn't entirely work for me. While I appreciate storytelling that is not quite as introspective as much modern fiction tends to be, I did want a little more insight than we got here. I think this is why I struggled a little getting into the book, for roughly the first third or so, until I was far enough that I was invested. By the end, I did feel a little as if I had been reading only to be prepared for the next book, where the emotional payoff for Elān had gone through would really come. A lot of questions remain open, even if the main quest-plot is tied up. I'm not sure yet if I will keep reading the trilogy, but I will probably dip into the next book when it comes out.
I give this novel...
3 Universes!
The Door on the Sea was an odd read for me because I, on the one hand, really enjoyed it and its world, and yet, on the other, was a little unaffected by it. However, I really liked this introduction to Tlingit culture and will definitely look out for more books inspired by and based on it!
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