A crowded but visceral epic fantasy with plenty of political intrigue.
This debut novel sees a fragile peace imperiled by a cult of assassins.
In Wallevet Ministry, a territory of the Donovan Kingdom, Lord Minister Raymond Reimvick has been killed. This places the Empire Alliance—which keeps delicate peace between the Donovards and the Almerians to the north—at risk, because Raymond was the only one willing to negotiate for the treaty’s extension. The Donovard king, Erech Avaleau, is weak in mind and body. Many jockey for his throne, including his brother, Duke Brugarn. Fortunately, the loyal Maillard Valient, lord minister of Delavon Ministry, heads for Eglamour Palace to aid the king. In the palace, Princess Milisend learns to replace jewels with thimbles from her lover and master thief, Regaume. Her behavior doesn’t go unnoticed by Chief Magistrate Tronchet, who’s determined to catch her. Meanwhile, at the Perilune Academy, a cadet named Fetzer has failed to make squire yet again. Worse, he’s bullied by his classmates and mocked for keeping a journal. After going on a bloody rampage, he escapes Barres Ministry aboard the ship Meurden. He then meets members of the Order of the Candlestone. Led by the alchemist Arasemis, this secret group hopes to dissolve the kingdom using the arcane methods of the ancient tribe the Naren-Dra. Fuchs’ epic fantasy is a marathon of political maneuvers packed with assassins, deadly concoctions, and saber-rattling nation states. His penchant for using names like Rachard and Meriam summons a parallel medieval Europe. Readers, even fans of Game of Thrones, might gape at the volume of characters and territories in rotation. The focus inevitably falls on a handful of players, and the narrative thrill comes from the carefully plotted metamorphosis, for example, of young Arthan Valient as he goes from nobleman’s son to instrumental hero. With both feet primarily in the human realm, the author delivers his most fantastical creation: the Naren-Dra culture. The mountain natives use masks of “aglanrit wood…lined with gray gill ferns” to protect against the “alchemical mixtures” with which they dispatch their enemies. By the end of this series opener, the principal cast has undergone dramatic changes in anticipation of wider adventures.
A crowded but visceral epic fantasy with plenty of political intrigue.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946883-00-1
Page Count: 593
Publisher: Loremark Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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