Short Book Review: A Complex, Nuanced Redwinter Adventure

Traitor of Redwinter, by Ed McDonald (Tor)]

I fell in love with Ed McDonald’s “Redwinter Chronicles” from the very first chapter of the very first book. His protagonist, Raine, is at once brilliantly flawed, self-doubting, and heroic. Her capacity for compassion and her clear-eyed courage are matched only by her conviction that she is worthless and unlovable. As an unreliable but deeply sympathetic heroine, she’s unmatched.

All is not well in the world of this second Redwinter novel. The king is dying, and a war of succession is brewing. With famine gripping the north, rebellious lords scheme for the power of the Crown that protects the living world from the forces of evil. Raine thought she had found a home in Redwinter, where those with magical powers can learn and flourish. But her mentor, Ulovar, is suddenly struck by a mysterious illness that slowly saps the vitality from his body, and her new friendships prove unexpectedly fragile. Meanwhile, the darkness within her grows, fueled by a mystical book that should not exist and that would mean her death should it be discovered. Everything comes crashing down when her erstwhile friend, Ovitus, puts together a new alliance to challenge the existing politics and wrest all power to himself.

Traitor of Redwinter is a complex, nuanced fantasy novel that does not hold back from difficult choices and dark themes. It builds on the events and system of magic from the first volume, shattering the established world and challenging notions of good and evil. It’s a brilliant, moving, ultimately compassionate tour de force.

Highly recommended, with the proviso that it’s not a stand-alone. Read the first volume first.

Book Review: The Conclusion of the Rook and Rose Trilogy

 

Labyrinth's Heart, by M. A. Carrick (Orbit)

Labyrinth's Heart completes the “Rook and Rose” trilogy by M. A. Carrick (in real life, Marie Brennan and Alyc Helms). The story began in the Venice-like city of Nadežra with the arrival of con-artist Ren, bent on impersonating a long-lost cousin of an aristocratic family and thereby worming her way into rank and riches. An uneasy peace between the nobility and the natives they oppress barely holds in the city. Between the Robin Hood-like Rook (which turns out to be not an individual person but a vocation transmitted through a magical mask), gangs tussling for territory, and the mind-controlling medallions left over from “the Tyrant,” Ren soon finds herself acting several, mutually incompatible roles. One of them, by the way, is a reader of special tarot-like cards, a “patterner.”

At the beginning of Labyrinth's Heart, Ren’s precarious balancing act comes crashing down with the arrival of a scheming social climber who knows her true story and will not stop at pressuring Ren to get what she wants, even at the expense of Ren’s now beloved family. Ancient malice awakens, the oppressed classes rise up against tyranny, and mystery piles upon mystery.

The three volumes weave together old evils, cursed clans, transcendent magic, political corruption, social upheaval, and a love story or two. Together, they form a long, slow simmer of a story that shines with its sympathetic characters and rich cultural setting. The cards used for “patterning” divination are particularly vivid, with a cohesion and archetypal resonance that makes them utterly believable. (The authors designed a deck of these cards that will soon be available.)

I’m a huge fan of the work of the authors and I loved these books. However, since this is a review, I must offer a few caveats. One is that the volumes should be read fairly close together. It had been several years since I read the middle book, and I found myself struggling to recall too many events, characters, place names, and clan relationships.

Two, a corollary, is that Labyrinth's Heart is not a stand-alone. There’s simply too much backstory for a book entire in itself, although the authors make a valiant attempt to supply synopses of previous books, character lists, glossary, etc.

Three is that one challenge of such a long, complex story lies in the sheer number of characters, each with a backstory. The inevitable result is that Ren, who was the front-and-center protagonist at the beginning, fades from time to time into a lesser position when everyone else’s story comes to a climax and resolution. Along with that complexity comes a multiplicity of endings. It’s a bit like the final volume of The Lord of the Rings, where the story does not end with the destruction of the One Ring or even with the hobbits returning home. Indeed, it goes on for chapter after chapter, and so, too, does the “Rook and Rose” saga. This is a good thing for readers who are sad to say good-bye to this marvelous world and its people; not so much for those who want a single, definitive “they lived happily ever after.”

A minor point is that Grey Serrado (Ren’s love interest, among other roles) has grown up thinking he was cursed (what looks like psychological child abuse turns out to have a basis in reality). How that came about and how it’s resolved play out in Labyrinth's Heart. The problem for me is that I never picked up on his being cursed in the first two books, so I was a bit taken aback when it became an important secondary thread. All these are minor quibbles, however, compared to the grand, sweeping scope of the books.

I leave you with one of the many beautiful, poetic lines from “Rook and Rose”:

May you see the face and not the mask.

Book Review: Tanya Huff's Into the Broken Lands

 Into the Broken Lands, by Tanya Huff (DAW)

Tanya Huff is a seasoned, multi-genre author whose work never ceases to amaze me with its sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and sheer drama. She’s as prolific as she is versatile, both with her many long-running series and her stand-alone novels. Into the Broken Lands introduces a completely new world and characters. The set-up is familiar to fantasy readers: generations ago, mages intoxicated by their own limitless powers shattered the laws of nature and reality, resulting in their own demise and a landscape of magical impossibilities, The Broken Lands. Since then, the royal heirs of Marsan, greatest of the surviving human realms, venture into The Broken Lands in search of the fuel for an ever-burning flame and their own legitimacy as rulers.

Here, Huff does something both challenging and brilliant: she weaves together two such journeys, one in the present and the other, a couple of generations ago. At first, the two seem disjoint, the past being no more than prolog to the present. As the two sets of characters venture deeper into the perilous Broken Lands, both similarities and differences echo and build on one another. Eventually, the fate of the earlier expedition shapes the present, and the present offers redemption for what has come before. The unifying elements include records kept by the first expedition, taken as reverential gospel, and the discovery of how scholars have selectively edited them, horrendous dangers that are repeated with unpredictable variations, and a single character: the sole surviving weapon of the mages, without which no heir can reach the source of the fuel and return safely. Only the weapon isn’t a thing, an “it;” the weapon is a person, a giant rock-like female warrior who had been enslaved and imprisoned until a healer, a member of the first party, saw her as a person.

Into the Broken Lands is understandably character-fueled, although there is plenty of action, escalating tension, and mystery in the story. At its core, however, the story allows us to examine key questions. What is a person—and how does one become a person? What is the redemptive power of love? What is the role of knowledge and is there such a thing as knowledge free from ethics? While an entertaining story filled with bizarre magic and compelling characters, it is at its heart a story of love and grief. Exceptionally well done!

Short Book Reviews: The Latest "October Daye" Adventure

 Be the Serpent, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)

I’ve loved Seanan McGuire’s “October Daye” urban fantasy since the very first volume and looked forward to each new installment. Be the Serpent is every bit a treat for long-time fans of the series. It is not, alas, an entry point for the new reader. Long-running series are often burdened by sheer weight of backstory. McGuire is skillful enough to weave in bare-minimum necessary details, but after 15 previous volumes, that amounts to a lot. Even though I had read all the previous volumes, some more than once, I found myself wondering who is this person and when did that happen? I wished for a “refresh my memory” synopsis from time to time, especially when supporting characters had similar names (like Simon and Sylvester, although there aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to give everyone in Toby Daye’s world a name starting with a different letter). I have the greatest sympathy for the poor, unsuspecting reader who tries to jump into the middle of the story. To be fair, there are plot elements that don’t depend on an encyclopedic knowledge of What Has Come Before and are engrossing in their own right.

Be the Serpent has the same delicious blend of Faerie, magic, romance, mystery, and action, not to mention great characters, as has come before. Fans will love it, me among them. If I was disappointed by once-terror-inspiring characters descending to warm-fuzziness, the switch from BFF to arch-enemy more than balanced it out.

The story ends on a partial resolution, a false cadence as it were, promising that the story isn’t over yet. This is great news for fans, maybe not so much for someone still trying to figure out what’s going on.

I tried to read the attached novella, but I kept falling asleep.

 

Book Reviews: A Brilliant Fantasy with an Intersex Hero

 The Desert Prince, by Peter V. Brett (Del Rey)

The Desert Prince was my introduction to the world of Peter V. Brett’s “Demon Cycle.” I’d read The Warded Man years ago, enjoyed it, but didn’t make the connection until sitting down to write this review. It’s a tremendous challenge for multi-volume series to make each book satisfying to the new reader without overwhelming with the backstory and boring continuing readers. Brett has accomplished this so deftly that I never missed what had come before, although now I want to go back and gobble up all the previous books. So if this is your entry point (aka “gateway drug”), dive right in!

In Brett’s world, demons arise from the core of the Earth, wreaking havoc and violence on human settlements. Fifteen years before the present, a small band of women and men created magical wards to beat back the hordes of demons and keep their lands and people safe. Now the teenaged children of those heroes have come of age, burdened by the weight of their legacies. Olive, the daughter of a duchess, has lived a life of luxury and confinement in a city, while Darrin, her childhood friend, who has a variety of magical talents, including the ability to change the density of his body, but who prefers to remain in obscurity while he creates musical magic with his pipes. Their parents tend to be both bossy and overprotective, which makes sense in light of their previous saving-the-world adventures. Naturally, neither teen is excited about living a safe, boring life of parental expectations, especially Olive.

Olive has a secret. When pregnant with Olive and her twin brother, her duchess mother engaged in a ferocious magical battle, resulting in the fusion of the two into a single, intersex person. “Which do you want to be? A boy or a girl,” the Duchess asks. Olive picks being a girl, although sooner or later, she knows, the game will be up, certainly on her wedding night. When she’s captured by a rival nation, who think to use her in a marriage alliance, her secret comes out. Princess Olive must then learn to survive as Prince Olive before the demons mass for another, devastating war. Olive is a wonderfully complex character, a joy to watch as they struggle against almost insurmountable odds, gains fighting skills, experiences love and loss, and brings their own perspective to the escalating conflicts, both between humans and between humans and the monstrous demon king, capable of controlling minds. A heroic, sympathetic intersex protagonist forced by circumstance to embrace both masculine and feminine aspects arises naturally from the world-building. The Desert Prince is written and marketed for a general fantasy audience, but readers with particular interest in LGBTQI characters will find the careful examination of gender issues especially rewarding.

Although The Desert Prince is clearly only the beginning of Olive’s and Darrin’s stories, it works well as a stand-alone. As I mentioned above, the backstory is woven into the action so skillfully that I never had the sense of not knowing what was going on or why. Instead, the story swept me up with a generosity that made every plot turn or character nuance a delight. The prose is smooth, the pacing brilliant, and the fight scenes some of the best I’ve ever read.

As I was writing this review, I came across an interview with Peter V. Brett. Check it out!