All too brief, alas, but a must-read for all fans of this outstanding series.
Novik crowned her nine-book Temeraire sequence, an alternate-world Napoleonic Wars featuring intelligent dragons, with League of Dragons (2016) and now weighs in with an associated all-original story collection, each entry occasioned by an accompanying fan illustration.
The entries comprise six stories plus 26 “drabbles”—a term, invented in Monty Python’s Big Red Book (1971) and possibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to novelist Margaret Drabble, indicating vignettes of 100 words or less. So accomplished, absorbing, and wide-ranging is Novik’s creation that the stories elicit enormous pleasure even when the contents are slight. Intriguingly, some don’t fit into the canon at all even when the world they evoke is perfectly familiar. In the splendid “Golden Age,” for example, we meet a Capt. Laurence who never encountered the Chinese imperial dragon Temeraire and is still a sea captain; here, he comes upon a similarly huge black dragon who calls himself Céleste and has taken up piracy as a career. “Planting Season” offers a glimpse of independent American dragon John Wampanoag making a living conveying cargo. “Dawn of Battle” features Capt. Jane Roland (later admiral and Laurence’s lover) taking charge of her dragon and crew as her mother never dared to do. A literary what-if, “Dragons and Decorum,” presents dragon-captain (!) Elizabeth Bennet, her dragon, Wollstonecraft, and her suitor, a certain Mr. Darcy, in action during the French invasion of England detailed in Victory of Eagles (2008). And the drabbles form an intriguing bunch: readers will have enormous fun working out where, or even if, they fit into the series, with outtakes from various times, locales, and events, whimsical sketches (Temeraire reads Beowulf, much to his confusion), and still others that hint at alternate worlds within alternate worlds (a dragon egg attended by robot servants hatches on an alien planet).
All too brief, alas, but a must-read for all fans of this outstanding series.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59606-829-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Subterranean Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
At Buckkeep in the Six Duchies, young Fitz, the bastard son of Prince Chivalry, is raised as a stablehand by old warrior Burrich. But when Chivalry dies without legitimate issue—murdered, it's rumored—Fitz, at the orders of King Shrewd, is brought into the palace and trained in the knightly and courtly arts. Meanwhile, secretly at night, he receives instruction from another bastard, Chade, in the assassin's craft. Now, King Shrewd's subjects are imperiled by the visits of the Red-Ship Raiders—formidable warriors who pillage the seacoasts and turn their human victims into vicious, destructive zombies. Since rehabilitating the zombies proves impossible, it's Fitz's task to go abroad covertly and kill them as quickly and humanely as possible. Shrewd orders that Fitz be taught the Skill—mental powers of telepathy and coercion possessed by all those of the royal line; his teacher is Galen, a sadistic ally of the popinjay Prince Regal, who hates Fitz all the more for his loyalty to Shrewd's other son, the stalwart soldier Verity. Galen brutalizes Fitz and, unknown to anyone, implants a mental block that prevents Fitz from using the Skill. Later, Shrewd decrees that, to cement an alliance, Verity shall wed the Princess Kettricken, heir to a remote yet rich mountain kingdom. Verity, occupied with Skillfully keeping the Red-Ship Raiders at bay, can't go to collect his bride, so Regal and Fitz are sent. Finally, Fitz must discover the depths of Regal's perfidy, recapture his true Skill, win Kettricken's heart for Verity, and help Verity defeat the Raiders. An intriguing, controlled, and remarkably assured debut, at once satisfyingly self-contained yet leaving plenty of scope for future extensions and embellishments.
Pub Date: April 17, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-37445-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spectra/Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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