Immersive worldbuilding adds texture to this dark, intriguing tale about a fighter.
In this fantasy novel, a dwarf grapples with deception and a stark destiny that could save, or ruin, his people.
The Nameless Dwarf first appeared in Prior’s The Resurrection of Deacon Shader (2009) and later in his own series, collected in The Nameless Dwarf: The Complete Chronicles (2013). Here, readers get the character’s origin story, including his name and how he came to lose it. Carnifex Thane wears the red cloak of the Ravine Guard in Arx Gravis but seldom faces real fighting in the safe and predictable city. A theft in the Scriptorium by a homunculus, or deep gnome, is alarming, however. Even more so is a frightening and deadly incursion in the mines by a creature that the toga-clad human Aristodeus calls a golem. If golems are real, maybe the legendary Axe of the Dwarf Lords is, too. Carnifex’s brother Lucius, a scholar, wants to mount an expedition to find the Axe, but the city’s do-nothing Council opposes the plan. Several losses send Carnifex to spar with baresarks (wild dwarfs) in the fighting circles of the lower city; feeling he has nothing left to lose, Carnifex makes the risky decision to follow his brother seeking the Axe and fulfill a fool’s prophecy: “You must forget in order to find the truth of who you are.” Prior weaves a fully realized world in this rich fantasy, from history, political structure, and family life to work, food, drinking (lots of drinking), and romance. The characters are also well-developed. Carnifex, for example, though a doughty fighter and drinker in the best dwarf tradition, struggles with a black-dog depression that “feasted on scraps of vitality, hunted for glimmers of hope and happiness.” Dwarf women play a larger and more vigorous role than in most fantasy novels, as when “hammering out a beat on the top of a long table, froth spraying from their whiskers.” But the book’s theology and competing truth claims are confusing for the reader as well as for Carnifex, making it hard to assess his choices.
Immersive worldbuilding adds texture to this dark, intriguing tale about a fighter.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5233-0191-1
Page Count: 310
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.
The third installment of this fantasy series (The Bone Season, 2013; The Mime Order, 2015) expands the reaches of the fight against Scion far beyond London.
Paige Mahoney, though only 19, serves as the Underqueen of the Mime Order. She's the leader of the Unnatural community in London, a city serving under the ever more militaristic Scion, whose government is based on ridding the streets of "enemy" clairvoyants. But Paige knows the truth about Scion's roots—that an Unnatural and immortal race called the Rephaim, who come from the Netherworld, forced Scion into existence to gain control over the growing human clairvoyant community. Scion’s hatred of clairvoyants now runs so deep that Paige is forced to consider moving her entire syndicate into hiding while she aims to stop Scion's next attack: there are rumors that Senshield, a scanner able to detect certain levels of clairvoyance, is going portable. Which means no Unnatural citizen is safe—their safe houses, their back-alley routes, are all at risk of detection. Paige’s main enemy this time around is Hildred Vance, mastermind of Scion’s military branch, ScionIDE. Vance creates terror by anticipating her opponent’s next moves, so with each step that Paige and her team take to dismantle Senshield, Vance is hovering nearby to toy with Paige’s will. Luckily, Paige is never separated for long from her Rephaite ally, Warden, as his presence is grounding. But their growing relationship, strengthened by their connection to the spirit world, takes a back seat to the constant, fast-paced action. The mesmerizing qualities of this series—insight into the different orders of clairvoyance as well as the intricately imagined details of Paige’s “dreamwalking” gift, with which she is able to enter others’ minds—fade to the background as this seven-part series climbs to its highest point of tension. Shannon’s world begins to feel more generically dystopian, but as Paige fights to locate and understand the spiritual energy powering Senshield, it is never less than captivating.
A tantalizing, otherworldy adventure with imagination that burns like fire.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-624-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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