White Stag, by Kara
Barbieri (St. Martin’s)
I was done with
Western European pseudo-Celtic fantasy a long time ago, so I welcomed this
Norse-based setting. Instead of dangerous/intoxicating elves/fae/fairies, we
have goblins. These are not the hunched-over, hook-nosed second-class orcs from
Middle Earth or fairy tales; these guys are seriously bad news. Their outer
forms can be just as supernally beautiful as those of Lothlorien elves but the
goblins are as blood-thirsty and contentious as it comes, quickly transforming
into their SuperPredator forms. In short, they’re extremely not-nice
characters, they live in the Permafrost where time and physics operate
differently, and every once in a while, they slaughter their king, take off
after the white stag that is the king’s spiritual guide, kill it on the border
with the human world, and the whole murderous shebang cycles through again.
Enter human heroine Janneke,
raised in a village near the Permafrost border, trained from childhood as a
hunter and tracker (and preferring the masculine form of her name rather than
the feminine Janneka). Enslaved by the goblins who burned her village, she’s
been subjected to a century of brutality. When, finally, she’s discarded as an
insulting gift to her master’s nephew, she’s near death and not about to trust
any goblin. At all. Ever.
All of this is
prelude to a love story.
