Breaks little new ground, but a solid, involving entry in a worthwhile, occasionally outstanding series.
Tenth (Madness in Solidar, 2015, etc.) in the Imager series: think an early modern France where magic, or “imaging,” requires precise visualization of technique and result. We pick up the previous timeline 13 years later.
Once again, storm clouds gather over L’Excelsis. The aristocratic High Holders, suffering financially from poor harvests and sons who run up gambling debts they’re unable to pay and resentful of a rising merchant class, demand that Rex Lorien reduce their taxes and repeal the Codis Legis, an agreement that sharply limits their authority and, they complain, infringes their ancient privileges. Lorien, typically, deals with the problem by ignoring it. Violent incidents involving the sons of aristocrats and merchants—including an abduction and possible murder—go largely unremarked, but when somebody starts to kill student imagers, Alastar, Maitre of Solidar's Collegium of Imagers, must intervene. He finds the increasingly wealthy factors (merchants) in no mood to cooperate with the Holders or make concessions. Unidentified civilians secretly ordered a batch of rifles powerful enough to penetrate imager shields. Certain Holders are building private armies. Too many key army officers are sons of Holders. And one of Alastar’s most powerful imagers may have turned renegade. All this isn’t too different from the previous book, just substitute a weak, indecisive Rex for an angry, intemperate one. Again, conversations are mostly didactic and, even between husband and wife in their most intimate moments, oddly formal. Still, readers who revel in action sequences won’t be disappointed. And, more intriguingly, Modesitt gives us a hero aware of growing older and conscious of his physical limitations.
Breaks little new ground, but a solid, involving entry in a worthwhile, occasionally outstanding series.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 9780765385406
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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