THE FIRST DEFINITION OF FORTUNE

BOOK ONE OF THE CORDONED KINGDOM

by Ken McEwen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2027

In this first volume of the Cordoned Kingdom fantasy series, a young thief seeks a better life in a rough water world.

As McEwen’s debut opens, more than nine centuries have passed since The Rending isolated the Illunni Realm from the rest of the world. Now, the Rim of reef islands borders the Tamarb Sea on the west, the Illunni Realm on the east, and beyond the Rim stretches the Ocean Beyond, filled with leviathans (“Nothing sailed past the Rim and survived,” readers are told). The novel’s action opens in the grubby town of Paradiso, where Captain Jeraphin Braz of the ship Brazzia has come on an unlikely trading mission, allegedly to deal in some of the Rim’s bits of trinket artwork with a shabby local named Ulweth, who turns out to be a bruman, slightly inhuman beings created by magic in the Dune War nearly 20 years prior (bruman have glowing blue eyes, that were “said to see the truth of things”). In short order, a teenage boy named Dez steals his purse. Dez is a well-known thief in Paradiso who seeks to use this big score to claw his way out of Paradiso, off the Rim, and into the wider world. “Life in Paradiso was no life at all; it was a slow decay, from which few ever escaped.” Dez thinks. “Most never tried—they hunkered down with their tiny piece of the world, raw as it was, and clung to it with undeserved ferocity while they waited to die.” After saying goodbye to the few elders who’ve ever treated him kindly (including the rumored witch Granny Raven, who’s tried for years to teach him to read and write, mostly without success), Dez and his friends Piknik and D’Mani leave Paradiso behind and strike out into a world of unguessed perils and surprises.

McEwen reveals his surprises—betrayals, close calls, a wild-spirited woman named Anabelle, and a pivotal meeting with a surgeon and pharmacologist named Grivaldi, who turns out to be much more than he seems at first—at the galloping pace that fits epic stories. For fantasy fans, all the standard conventions are here: chapters headed with epigraphs quoting from in-continuity works of literature; coming-of-age revelations about a waif who starts with nothing but may turn out to be the Key to Everything, a gradual moving of the plot’s concerns from the petty to the grand (pipe-weed to palantírs, in Tolkien terms). Readers simply looking for those archetypes will find plenty of them, but there’s a good deal more energy and insight to this book than merely checking fantasy-lit boxes. McEwen has crafted a watery fantasy world that feels entirely real. The prose can sometimes be overblown (“Fourteen years, since the clang of sword and dagger faded into a gentle tide of tears, since the blood was scoured from the stones and the bright banners furled,” goes one such passage. “Only memories walk those cobbled floors, thick now with dust, cobwebs the only banners”). But McEwen’s narrative zest and steady developing of the dangers facing his heroes, from wily Grivaldi to too-perfect Dez, makes the book memorable and effectively poises the reader for future installments in the series, when presumably most of the concepts only sketched in here (the bruman, the various religious sects of the Illunni Realm, the promise of the Ocean Beyond, etc.) will be fleshed out.

A promising and deep opening to a new fantasy series.

Pub Date: May 4, 2027

ISBN: 979-8991300711

Page Count: 488

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: today

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

FANTASY | GENERAL FANTASY | ACTION & ADVENTURE FANTASY