No fangs, capes, hissing or bats: just a wise immortal moved by vast pity.
The latest entry in Yarbro’s impressive historical fantasy cycle, each independently intelligible, about the saintly vampire Count Saint-Germain (Commedia Della Morte, 2012, etc.).
The year is 1225, just after the Fifth Crusade. An uneasy stalemate prevails between Christianity and Islam, while the seemingly unstoppable Mongol armies of Jenghiz Khan threaten both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Saint-Germain, here known as Sidi Sandjer’min, lives quietly in an Egyptian monastery with his servant, Ruthier, a ghoul and fellow immortal. Sieur Horembaud du Langnor, an arrogant and impetuous crusader from English-ruled Aquitaine, requires a guide for his pilgrimage south to remote Ethiopia, where he must pray at the Chapel of the Holy Grail. Since it is no longer safe for Sandjer’min to remain where he is, he agrees to help. Joining Sieur Horembaud will be a large assorted party, some of whom are fellow penitents: Sieur Horembaud’s shadow, the suspicious friar Frater Anteus; Torquil des Lichiens, a crusader dying of severe sunstroke; a nun, Sorer Imogen, and her young half brother Heneri; the English noblewoman, Margrethe of Rutland; and still others who hope to find valuable relics or gold. Among the dangers faced by the party will be the blistering heat that obliges them to travel at night, the annual rise of the Nile, as well as snakes, scorpions, wild beasts and bandits. For his part, Sandjer’min must translate for them, minister to their various wounds, injuries and illnesses, and try to prevent the pilgrims from turning savagely on each other. Once again, Yarbro offers a wonderfully rich historical backdrop, beautifully framed with a series of explicatory epistles, vividly drawn scenes and a notable cast of characters, to which the meandering plot fails to do justice.
No fangs, capes, hissing or bats: just a wise immortal moved by vast pity.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3400-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.
Book 2 of Hearne's latest fantasy trilogy, The Seven Kennings (A Plague of Giants, 2017), set in a multiracial world thrust into turmoil by an invasion of peculiar giants.
In this world, most races have their own particular magical endowment, or “kenning,” though there are downsides to trying to gain the magic (an excellent chance of being killed instead) and using it (rapid aging and death). Most recently discovered is the sixth kenning, whose beneficiaries can talk to and command animals. The story canters along, although with multiple first-person narrators, it's confusing at times. Some characters are familiar, others are new, most of them with their own problems to solve, all somehow caught up in the grand design. To escape her overbearing father and the unreasoning violence his kind represents, fire-giant Olet Kanek leads her followers into the far north, hoping to found a new city where the races and kennings can peacefully coexist. Joining Olet are young Abhinava Khose, discoverer of the sixth kenning, and, later, Koesha Gansu (kenning: air), captain of an all-female crew shipwrecked by deep-sea monsters. Elsewhere, Hanima, who commands hive insects, struggles to free her city from the iron grip of wealthy, callous merchant monarchists. Other threads focus on the Bone Giants, relentless invaders seeking the still-unknown seventh kenning, whose confidence that this can defeat the other six is deeply disturbing. Under Hearne's light touch, these elements mesh perfectly, presenting an inventive, eye-filling panorama; satisfying (and, where appropriate, well-resolved) plotlines; and tensions between the races and their kennings to supply much of the drama.
A charming and persuasive entry that will leave readers impatiently awaiting the concluding volume.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-345-54857-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.
Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.
The world’s not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call it Romeo and Juliet for the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text, The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, “She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it.” Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as “the man in the grey suit”? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise of teenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia’s magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53463-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
