Rating: 5🌈

Sunrunner is the penultimate book in this fantastic fantasy series by Sam Burns, The Summertide Chronicles. A epic fantasy adventure that’s been focusing on the four main magical houses or families of this world, houses that have fallen into disrepute or aren’t functioning properly.  And a huge ecological disaster is looming that threatens to end them all if the houses aren’t put to right and ready to go and meet the needs of the threat as a whole.

The stories so far have been the around the heirs and histories of the Gloombringers, the Dawnchasers, and now the Sunrunners.  The most powerful and striking figures belong to the white-haired Moonstrikers.  They are central characters in every story and they will also have the final word and finale novel.

The characters that are involved in this series are one that are introduced at the beginning and evolve into fully developed characters throughout this series, especially in their respective stories. That’s never more accurate than here with the Sunrunner family.

Sam Burns writing is so outstanding and the characters are all so different  but compelling in how beautifully Burns created them. Layered, vibrant, and yet their depths of cultures and family dynamics are there . It allows for the reader to easily see the nuances the author is factoring into her characters.  Just magnificent characterizations which are then laid out into an ever changing narrative, one which is exploring further the relationships and bonds of the sentient stone people, and the crisis on the horizon.

Sunrunner has some of the most interesting, potentially powerful characters of the series.  There’s Kit Moonstriker, the duelist formerly known as Winter. His book is the last. He’s there along with their sister, Ember,  and importantly, their brother, Frost, a highly intelligent, innocent man who rarely leaves the family house and territory. 

It’s due to Caspian Sunrunner and Ember showing up to ask for help at the end of the last novel that’s set these events in motion. Caspian’s father, The Sunrunner, has disappeared and he needs to be found before the family summit on Mount Slate.

The storylines here are incredibly complex and full of emotional twists. What starts off as a great adventure with characters framed out in certain aspects soon becomes a very different story. One that’s unsurprisingly darker, more complicated and more intriguing. Also one that grabs the reader’s heart as well as the reader’s mind. 

Both are completely invested in all the characters and all the various aspects of the emerging plots and new storylines.  The different sentient stones that each family member is bonded to also is a major character with a distinct personality.  Their relationships, with their bonded as well as each other, is another expanding storyline that I can’t get enough of.  These stones have enormous power and influence, as well as unexplored abilities.  I could read an entire series based on them and the history alone. 

Sam Burns really has a masterpiece here. And Sunrunner is the best of a fabulous series. I can’t imagine what that fourth book will bring.  

But Frost himself says it the best. 

“The word you’re looking for is perfect. It’s perfect.”

I won’t ever be ready for it to end.

Among my best of 2024, and I expect of 2025.

Highly recommended as well as the author.

Love these covers too. 

The Summertide Chronicles:

• Gloombringer #1
• Dawnchaser #2 
• Sunrunner #3 
• Moonstriker #4 – March 2025

Buy Link

        Sunrunner (The Summertide Chronicles Book 3)

Blurb 

My father is missing, and along with him, the Sunrunner family stone, Nausa. My aunt swears this is common for him, but I know different. Yes, my father is lost deep in his addictions, but he’s never disappeared before. If it weren’t up to me to handle the mess my family has made, I’d be a thousand miles away by now. But time is running out and the threatening eruption of Mount Slate keeps inching closer.

Now, Half the Moonstriker family has come to help me look for Nausa, including Kit, a freaking assassin, and his brother Frost, the most beautiful man ever born. Frost almost makes me want to stick around, for the first time in my life.

But suddenly, nothing can go right. From a near-miss in the car to an ugly realization about my entire childhood, not to mention the way Kit Moonstriker keeps looking at me like he’s deciding where to stab, saving the world isn’t as simple as it sounds.

Sunrunner is the third in a series of four books, starring one beautiful mathematician ingenue, one bad boy who isn’t so bad—he swears, and one overprotective brother who might be forced to teach him a lesson or two. It contains Caspian and Frost’s HFN, and continues the overall story arc of the series.

• Publication date: January 2, 2025
• Language: English
• Print length: 270 pages