Thrilling while remaining both emotionally and logically true; readers will regret bidding farewell to Amalia and her...
Caruso completes her epic Swords and Fire trilogy (The Tethered Mage, 2017; The Defiant Heir, 2018), based in a Venice-like city at the heart of an empire where magic can be wielded like a weapon.
Sadistic (and, unfortunately, immortal and nearly invulnerable) Witch Lord Ruven of Vaskandar prepares to launch the large-scale invasion he’s been threatening for two previous books, infiltrating Raverra via the dangerous magical hybrids known as chimeras and an alchemical potion that puts the drinker, however reluctant, under his control. Meanwhile, Lady Amalia Cornaro, a young Raverran noblewoman with an unorthodox link to the fire mage Zaira, works to convince the Serene Imperial Assembly to pass a law freeing mages from government control, a tricky proposition given that mages are the Serene Empire’s best defense against the Witch Lords’ magic. She’s also still torn emotionally between Marcello, the Falconer Captain she loves, who is politically unsuitable as a husband, and a somewhat better match, Kathe, the mercurial and not entirely trustworthy Witch Lord she’s beginning to care for despite herself. The personal and the political converge explosively as Ruven’s plans come to dreadful fruition: He transforms Marcello into a chimera forced to obey his will and strike at Amalia where she is most vulnerable. Amalia must depend on both Zaira and Kathe to protect and support her as she puzzles out how to defeat this seemingly indestructible foe while trying to guard both her heart and integrity from further injury. Once again, Caruso admirably refuses to pull her punches, for the most part. Bad things happen to good people and choices have real consequences. The book convincingly and compellingly completes Amalia’s transformation from a shy, scholarly young woman reluctant to grasp the reins of power into a capable politician willing to do what is necessary and expedient even if it means a personal sacrifice. Caruso’s writing has also grown in complexity and nuance as the author has charted Amalia’s course.
Thrilling while remaining both emotionally and logically true; readers will regret bidding farewell to Amalia and her friends.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-46693-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.
Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.
The world’s not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call it Romeo and Juliet for the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text, The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, “She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it.” Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as “the man in the grey suit”? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise of teenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia’s magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, “There’s magic in that. It’s in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict.”
Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-53463-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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