Despite the imperfections, Modesitt once again delivers an engrossing power struggle negotiated by a virtuous and talented...
The ninth book in the Imager series moves on some 380 years from the previous entry (Antiagon Fire, 2013).
For a century, the influence of Solidar's Collegium of Imagers has waned, due to weak leadership, lack of ambition and a willingness to contribute nothing except political loyalty in return for the Rex’s monetary support. To his own surprise, Alastar, a talented senior imager (wizard) who’s all but unknown in the capital, L’Excelsis, and has little knowledge of conditions there, learns he has been selected as the new Maitre. On his arrival, Alastar finds that imager training has languished, and senior imagers with divided loyalties have allowed factionalism and a culture of bullying to take hold among the student body. Rex Ryen, the stubborn and intemperate ruler, insists on imposing a huge tax increase on the High Holders (landowners) and factors (merchants), a demand the High Holders contemptuously disregard. Ryen angrily orders Alastar to assassinate the High Holders one by one until they comply—a command Alastar cannot obey but cannot dismiss. Neither the Rex nor the Holders consider the imagers a threat. As Alastar tries to unravel the bewildering yet overwhelmingly important tangle of politics and familial relationships that swirl around the Holders and the Rex, he learns that the army—swollen to unrealistic proportions, rebellious and itching for a fight—might intervene. And renegade imager Desyrk, with ties to both the military and the Rex’s family, threatens both the Collegium and the Rex. With meticulously wrought characters and complex, logically developed plotting that towers above the fantasy norm, it’s easy to forgive the author, here, his unusually pedestrian prose, stiff dialogue and flat-footed tendency to dwell on the nondeist religion practiced by everyone.
Despite the imperfections, Modesitt once again delivers an engrossing power struggle negotiated by a virtuous and talented man committed to achieving the greater good by way of the least harm.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7985-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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 somewhat fragmentary nocturnal shadows Jim Nightshade and his friend Will Halloway, born just before and just after midnight on the 31st of October, as they walk the thin line between real and imaginary worlds. A carnival (evil) comes to town with its calliope, merry-go-round and mirror maze, and in its distortion, the funeral march is played backwards, their teacher's nephew seems to assume the identity of the carnival's Mr. Cooger. The Illustrated Man (an earlier Bradbury title) doubles as Mr. Dark. comes for the boys and Jim almost does; and there are other spectres in this freakshow of the mind, The Witch, The Dwarf, etc., before faith casts out all these fears which the carnival has exploited... The allusions (the October country, the autumn people, etc.) as well as the concerns of previous books will be familiar to Bradbury's readers as once again this conjurer limns a haunted landscape in an allegory of good and evil. Definitely for all admirers.
Pub Date: June 15, 1962
ISBN: 0380977273
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1962
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