A Breathless Sky

A sibling feud heats up in this sluggish sequel to Henry’s The Canopy Keepers. Syrah, a national park ranger who embarrassingly sprouts fungi every time she gets nervous, is a member of the underground world called Rhiza, training to become its next Keeper of the Canopy. She has not yet mastered the skill of connecting to the Mother (a “green goddess” who communes with her followers by penetrating them with her “filaments”), however, leading some Rhizans to doubt whether the reigning Keeper, Taron, has erred in endorsing her. When Taron is found murdered, Syrah must locate and punish those responsible—one of whom is her bio-hacking brother Romelo, an insurgent who wants to save Earth from ecological disaster by ridding it of humans. As brother and sister grapple, the plot moves at a snail’s pace, slowed by the siblings’ laboriously seeded backstories, an overabundance of secondary characters, and clumsy attempts at describing mycorrhizal communication (“When they touch, his hairs and the roots, every time, it is like a most delicious first kiss”). To make matters worse, Rhiza as a fantasy biome feels disappointingly sparse; readers must make do with scant details such as bioluminescent mushrooms lighting the subterranean paths. Fans of botanical cli-fi would do better to seek out works by Susan Burke or Kritika Rao. (Dec.)