As they beg our sympathy for their white-knuckled grief, these heroines speak a rhetoric that itself must have been bounced...
As with the bloody Black Blade (1999), Lustbader again abandons his Ninja action tales to return to the fantasy and foam of his earlier Sunset Warrior cycles. Will loyal fans find this moonglow too greatly at odds with his somersaulting thrillers and perhaps not cross over?
Things open with an overstuffed prologue, adrift in orientalia (“It was Lonon, the Fifth Season—that eerie time between High Summer and Autumn when the gimnopedes swarmed; when, on clear nights, all five moons, pale green as a dove’s belly, could be seen in the vast black bowl of night”). Readers lacking photographic memory will tremble at the elaborate background Lustbader sets up even before the story begins, a vast scheme ringing echoes on a half dozen other far-world phantasmagorias galloping toward Tor to be born. So it is that Giyan and Bartta, female twins, are born and, rather than having them killed, their mother ships them off to be raised as Ramahan at the Abbey of Floating White. By age 15, the twins, devoted to phytochemistry and the Goddess Miina, are versed in the religious politics of their day: their people, the Kundalan, now in bondage to the V’ornn, will be released only when Dar Sala-at returns to fulfill the prophecy made in The Five Sacred Books of Miina, finds The Pearl and defeats the V’ornn (a mission mirroring the messianic salvation brought by Paul Atreides in Dune). Who is the Dar Sala-at? None other than Riane, a girl V’ornn (raised as the enemy, for better or worse), whose burgeoning sorcerer’s energy will bring lightning to the sky, presaging the appearance of Miina’s Sacred Five Dragons.
As they beg our sympathy for their white-knuckled grief, these heroines speak a rhetoric that itself must have been bounced off the five moons. Still, this midnight dish will leave many disembodied with rapture.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-87235-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Will wolves and orcs—or whatever they are—take over the world, or will the good guys prevail? Jordan’s fans, who are legion,...
“There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time.” Even so, with this volume, the late Jordan’s hyperinflated Wheel of Time series grinds to a halt.
Jordan (Eye of the World, 1990, etc.), here revived by way of the extensive notebooks, drafts and outlines he left behind by amanuensis Sanderson (Creative Writing/Brigham Young Univ.), was an ascended master of second-tier Tolkien-ism; the world he creates is as densely detailed as Middle-earth, and if the geography sounds similar, pocked with place names such as Far Madding and the Blasted Lands, that’s no accident. Tolkien-esque, too, is the scenario for this saga-closer, namely a “last battle” in which the forces of good are arrayed against those of darkness. The careless reader might take this to be a battle of hairdressers in a West Indian neighborhood: “The Dreadlords came for him eventually, sending an explosion to finish the job. Deepe spent the last moments throwing weaves at them. He died well.” That’s not the case, of course; instead, saga heroes Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara range the lands beyond the Dark One’s prison to do all manner of good and adventuresome things. It’s a strange world, that: Perrin finds the pit to end all pits, “[a]n eternal expanse, like the blackness of the Ways, only this one seemed to be pulling him into it.” But then, what kind of epic would it be if it weren’t a strange place?
Will wolves and orcs—or whatever they are—take over the world, or will the good guys prevail? Jordan’s fans, who are legion, will most decidedly want to learn the answer to that question.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2595-2
Page Count: 912
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
A sensuous, shades-of-moral-gray world; a compelling, passionate heroine; a high-stakes quest for revenge—this is a fantasy...
A dark and bloody fantasy about a young woman bent on revenge—at almost any price.
Mia Corvere was 10 years old when she watched her father be hanged as a traitor, saw her mother and infant brother hauled away to die in prison, and escaped death herself at the hands of two trained Luminatii soldiers. She’s darkin, which means she can control shadows, and her constant companion, a cat made of shadows, drinks her fear. But even that won’t be enough to get the revenge she craves on the powerful men who destroyed her family. That’s why she’s traveled out to the ends of civilization to gain entry to the Red Church, where “the greatest enclave of assassins in the known world” worships the goddess of night, Niah, “Our Lady of Blessed Murder.” If she can get inducted into the Red Church, she’ll have the skills she needs to exact her revenge. She just has to survive her training—at the hands of the world’s most deadly, amoral assassins. Kristoff (Illuminae, 2015, etc.) comes on strong from the start, creating a shadowy world dripping with blood, in which our feisty, determined heroine must claw her way to the top of a deadly pecking order. Mia manages to find connection and even caring in the black pit of the Red Church—but how long can it last?
A sensuous, shades-of-moral-gray world; a compelling, passionate heroine; a high-stakes quest for revenge—this is a fantasy fans won’t be able to put down.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016
ISBN: 9781250073020
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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