When Dark Waters Burn by Zena Shapter

Title: When Dark Waters Burn

Author: Zena Shapter

Genre: Fantasy

Publisher: MidnightSun Publishing

Published: 1^st June 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 400

Price: $21.99

Synopsis: Stay out of sight. Stay hidden under the lake. Even as giant water-ants scout the surface, and deadly trees slop their hungry roots along the shoreline. For unrest surges in the swamps, getting closer and closer… Sala will only be safe for as long as their ship’s location remains a secret. But when a horrifying threat ignites close to home, and the lakeside hillfarms are forced to reveal a desperate truth, it unleashes a wreckage of terror and destruction on the world of Palude.

What Sala fears most becomes irrelevant. All she can do is run, and make one irrevocable choice after another. If she’s to have any kind of future, she must fight to accept the collapse of her past. Hiding from it was never an option.

~*~

Palude is in danger, and Sala must stay out of sight, on the run, as unrest encroaches and surges through the swamps, moving towards the town and ship. Sala and her friends are no longer safe – or they are, at least if they stay on the ship. Heading out is dangerous. And yet…when her home is threatened, Sala has to leave safety to face the threat and the dark truth the lakeside hillfarms have always been trying to hide. Things are more complicated than that though, and as the science fiction/fantasy story unfolds. It captures real world fears and uses them in a fictional setting and shows what a world beyond Earth, another inhabited planet, might be like.

Sala’s future is in danger – mirroring the dangers of climate change, war and terrorism in the modern world. The threats are fantastical, yet there are aspects that feel as though they are inspired by what is going on in the world today or what has happened in the past. Where we never really know who to trust, where things just seem to fall apart everywhere. Where the threats keep coming. And where things from Sala’s past could come back to haunt her. Throughout the novel, Sala is grappling with reconciling her future and her past, and her hopes that she could have hidden from it. Even as some things seemed to look hopeful, they came crashing down as the implications of any choices Sala and her friends made crashed down around them. The politics of their world mirror things like totalitarianism and fascism, and the complete control that in our world, the people who want everything for themselves and are happy to see everyone else suffer.  This powerful statement shows that reading and books are political, and sends a message about standing up to things that you don’t believe in.

As this science fiction/fantasy story unfolds, it is clear that this is another universe, potentially in the future, or even parallel to our time and world.  It’s also its own entity, where anything can happen on another planet where humans exist. It works well, because it means that any of these options work for the story, and show that there are many ways to tell a science fiction story. It doesn’t always have to be futuristic. It can exist in its own world and time, separate from what we know or have on Earth. That doesn’t mean the dangers are that different. As someone who isn’t a huge reader of science fiction, I was engaged with this one and enjoyed reading it, and peeling back the layers of what was going on.

New and unique threats take the place of real-world ones, and are highlighted as big unknowns, where nobody really knows what has gone on at times. Or where trusting people is a huge gamble for these teens trying to make their world a better place. Zena has skilfully brought several elements of politics and conflict together, and created a world that reflects the intersection and teetering edges of these issues. And with teenage characters who are relatable in their determination, reluctance, and vulnerability. And whose voices tell a compelling story whilst maintaining their distinct teenagerhood. Nobody feels out of place, and I did feel that some of what Sala and her friends go through were things that anyone might feel when going through something dangerous and unknown.

Sala’s determination to make her world safe, to end the resurgence of violence and keep everyone she cares about safe mirrors what activists around the world and throughout time have done. She’s got the zest and spirit of resistance fighters from World War II, or any other conflict where resistance against a dictatorship or totalitarian power has encroached on safety and freedoms. It’s quietly revolutionary and at times, loudly revolutionary. A call to action, almost, to speak up against lies and injustice. And to fight in ways that you are able to fight. And throughout this, Sala and her friends grapple with identity, how life is valued or devalued, cultural implications and rivalries and the destruction of community as the politics rife in Palude seek to alienate people and spread mistrust. And how can one individual destroy so much for so many people. There are many layers to this novel that reflect what the world we live in whilst also creating a new world with its own conflicts. This is an interesting sci-fi/fantasy that I think follows on from a previous book, but still reads like its own story. Just in the same world as the other book. Readers of When Dark Roots Hunt or other science fiction and fantasy books will enjoy this one.