Heroic Relay Race: Review of Caskey Russell’s The Eagle in the Mountain

Aidan Bunker Under Review:The Eagle in the Mountain. Caskey Russell. Solaris, November 2026. For the first 50 pages of Caskey Russell’s The Eagle in the Mountain (sequel to The Door on the Sea), I found myself holding my breath. In part, this was due to the book dropping directly into a ferocious battle, but also, I, like many readers, carry the wounds of disappointing sequels. However, I quickly found that where the first book opened the door to the Aaní world, this follow-up soars. Russell returns even stronger in this volume, with an action-packed plot as our protagonist takes on teamwork, tradition, and technology, all of which challenge her personal and cultural values. The Door on the Sea is an alien (and colonizer) invasion story that combines coming-of-age and epic fantasy elements in which a young Aaní boy named Elān journeys with his crew (human warriors and a wolf) in a beautiful canoe, Waka, to retrieve a powerful weapon lost by the invading Koosh. In The Eagle in the…