Two sisters develop life-changing abilities in Carlton’s novelistic retelling of a classic fairy tale.

Gwendolyn Honeydale’s father is dead, but she seems to be the only one who cares. Her vain sister, Fanny, wears a dress to the funeral so revealing that it distracts the priest, and her stingy mother allows the gravediggers to take as payment the coin in her father’s mouth—the one that tradition says is for paying St. Peter. With her father gone, Gwen is completely at the mercy of the older Honeydale women, who force her to sleep in the attic and shoulder most of the housework. The only kindness she finds comes from Paolo, the handsome young glassmaker who’s just come to town to sell his wares in the marketplace. Gwen’s mother has arranged to have Fanny married off to Tobias Prigghemp, the detestable eldest son of a local landowner and favorite of the king. Even worse, her mother wants Gwen to marry Jerome Prigghemp, the younger brother, meaning she can’t act on the mutual attraction she feels with Paolo. When Gwen encounters an old woman in the woods, she offers her water, only to discover that the woman is a witch—or, if the woman is to be believed, Gwen’s fairy godmother. The woman grants Gwen an unasked-for ability of arguable value: Now, diamonds and roses tumble, unwanted, out of her mouth. While socially embarrassing, the idea of unlimited diamonds inspires the older Tobias to rescind his offer to Fanny and extend it to Gwen instead. Miffed, Fanny hunts down the fairy godmother and receives a similar—if less desirable—ability: When she cries, vipers and toads escape from her mouth. These traits make life quite a bit more complicated for the Honeydale sisters. Suspected of witchcraft, Fanny is forced to go on the run, and she soon becomes the apprentice of the fairy who cursed her. Meanwhile, Gwen is newly betrothed to a gorgeous prince and whisked off to the capital. Gwen is no happier with the new situation than Fanny, and both will have to figure out a way to free themselves from their bizarre circumstances.

Carlton writes with great humor and specificity, forging, like Paolo with his glasswork, a unique sensibility within a world of familiar fairy-tale trappings. Here, Fanny sneaks into Gwen’s wedding to the prince and invisibly watches her sister from above: “Fanny was still agitated with envy but it was obvious that Gwendolyn was unhappy…She hadn’t smiled once during the ceremony and looked as scared as a half-drowned kitten. She’s just a commodity to the royals, thought Fanny. More of a mineral mine than a queen consort.” The first act of the novel is a fleshed-out but more or less faithful treatment of the Charles Perrault story “The Faeries.” Carlton’s contribution is to continue playing out the scenario, allowing characters who initially seem one-dimensional to deepen and change in unexpected ways. Readers unfamiliar with the original story will still enjoy this witty, immersive fantasy.

An inventive and enchanting fable about marriage, sisterhood, and embarrassing medical conditions.

The conclusion to a fantasy trilogy in which embattled tiny humans vie with insects.

This final volume in Carlton’s epic Antasy series takes readers back to a world where people have evolved to insect size and are surrounded by terrifying predators on land and in the air. The first book, Prophets of the Ghost Ants (2016),introduced readers to a wretched human underling named Anand, who dreams of freeing his people from the terror of the Ghost Ants and eventually founds the new and enlightened nation of Bee-Jor. As the series progressed through the second volume, Prophet of the Termite God (2019),readers followed Anand’s journey through scenes of war, torture, and hairbreadth adventure. That adventure concludes in this final volume, in which the realm of Bee-Jor is tottering due to outside and internal threats, including one that’s represented by one of the book’s most intriguing characters: the mad Queen Trellana, who threatens the new nation’s very existence in these pages. This plot of this series entry involves a blinded and desperate Anand being captured by a mysterious group, among whom he makes new friends and allies while in captivity; meanwhile, he agonizes over his ignorance of what’s happening in faction-torn Bee-Jor, where war is looming and a tense situation isn’t being helped at all by Queen Trellana’s delusional histrionics.

Carlton skillfully manipulates readers’ feelings of anticipation about the fate of Bee-Jor and about Anand himself, and he does so right from the beginning of this complex volume. The saga of Anand, also known as “Roach Boy,” is still central to the sprawling narrative, but many other important plotlines converge in this concluding entry, which the author fills with engaging characters and gritty, often violent Game of Thrones–style action and realpolitik. Over the course of three books, the author has been pursuing this story with gusto and intense readability, often through the use of vivid, gripping language—as when Anand is in the midst of traveling, exhausted, and Carlton sets the scene by noting that “Night slithered in, as cold and damp as an earth worm.” Overall, this is an extensively fleshed-out world that’s raw and brutal but very satisfyingly imagined. Unlike in many other epic fantasy novels, the characters in this story (human and otherwise) really seem to live in this strange world; the internal consistency of the reality Carlton has imagined is solid to the last detail. This third volume is very much aimed at existing fans of the series; it begins with a large glossary of dramatis personae, but it lacks the kind of series-to-this-point recap that’s common in other fantasy tomes, and that’s sorely needed here; without it, there’s little chance that new readers can come onboard with this book. This is unfortunate, as the various aspects of Anand’s character are more effectively rendered in these pages than in previous entries, and Carlton’s handling of the multifaceted story has never been more confident.

An immensely satisfying final volume in Carlton’s humans-and-insects saga.

An epic tale of tiny humans and warring insect empires continues in this sequel.

Carlton’s (Prophets of the Ghost Ants, 2011) saga picks up where the earlier novel left off: in a world called Dranveria, where humans exist alongside various species of insects (they’re all roughly the same size). Here, a former lower-caste, midden-slave human named Anand finds himself in the unlikely position of national savior. He led an insect army to defend his home of the Slope against the invading forces of Hulkrish and their Prophet-Commander, his own cousin Pleckoo. Against all odds, Anand was victorious, but Pleckoo isn’t dead—the threat posed by the followers of the god Hulkro remains. This latest volume employs a split narrative in order to trace the separate adventures of Anand—who must deal with the many problems facing his fledgling kingdom, from new rumblings of war to a building refugee crisis and potentially deadly palace intrigue—and Pleckoo, now a fugitive. Pleckoo seemingly has the whole of Dranveria against him—except for Hulkro, in whose service he is still a vision-driven fanatic despite dream-world visitations from other insect deities. “Hulkro does not rule the Netherworld. I do,” one god tells him. “Where is Little Termite now?” “High above, in the night sky, where He rules over all,” the faithful Pleckoo responds. “You have said He is the only god,” the rival deity answers, “yet here I am, deciding your fate for eternity.” The proceedings are suffused with the complicated dynamics of clashing religions, and this volume in the Antasy series places slightly more emphasis on Pleckoo’s story, making it an intriguing counterpoint to the previous installment. As in that earlier novel, Carlton displays in his insect high fantasy tale a completely assured—and totally infectious—imagination while employing precisely controlled narrative pacing. There’s a minor strand of purple prose running through the book that can easily be read as a winking homage to the hyperventilation of classic pulp fantasy authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs (“Knowing he was alone, Pleckoo fell to his hands and knees and wailed. He choked on his own sobbing, hoping to cough out the hundred thousand demons that warred inside him”; and Anand’s reflection on his predicament later in the story: “My wife is the pregnant prisoner of the diseased man inflicting his madness on the world”). This kind of rhetorical playfulness perfectly serves the boilerplate of the plot, and it’s expertly balanced with Carlton’s insightful realization of the internal facets of his realm. Anand, for instance, is still scornfully referred to as “Roach Boy” by some of the very people he tried to help. When he asks what he’s done to warrant such hostility, he’s told: “What haven’t you done? You’ve turned our lives downside up. We was fine in the old way, as good as anybody else in the midden.” The characters of Pleckoo and Anand dominate the volume’s two scenarios, but the tale unfolds in a way that very naturally expands to embrace not only a host of secondary characters, but also an abundance of intricate worldbuilding. Readers should keep in mind that the titles of these novels are apt: No detail of Dranveria’s vast theological mosaic is left unexplored.

A dense, complex, and engrossing second installment of a genuinely promising high fantasy series.

In this postapocalyptic science-fiction allegory, diminutive tribal humans share the world, and a deeply intertwined society, with hordes of insects.

Anand, the despised young lower-caste protagonist of Carlton’s innovative novel, knows perfectly well how his life will unfold. He slaves in the filthy middens of his human colony, marked by skin color, scent and even body posture as inferior to the higher classes of humans who run the colony and serve the queen. In this postapocalyptic version of human society, where humans have evolved to the size of insects in response to the planet’s diminshing resources, someone like Anand has no hope of rising above his station or changing his life. His only hope is to grow old working in peace rather than be killed by the myriad insectoid menaces that stalk his world. (The author expertly shifts his narrative pacing for violent scenes that crop up frequently in the novel and are intensely memorable.) But when word comes that his colony is splitting up, sending a queen and a host of workers to found a new colony, fate offers Anand a chance to become more than he’s ever dreamed. “The history of our land is always written in blood,” one character tells him, but in addition to blood there’s doctrine here—Carlton has a surprising amount to say about organized religion and its heresies (the so-called Loose Doctrine of Dranveria plays a major role in the book), and approaches his commentary with drama and intelligence. Anand becomes something of a firebrand, insisting “No idol, book, word, place or relic should ever be held sacred…Only human life is sacred.” The complications he faces in his rise to power make for a gripping read.

The wobbly science of its premise notwithstanding, this is a fascinating, enjoyable sci-fi yarn.