Book Review | The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente

Inside a small Yorkshire parsonage, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë have invented a game called Glass Town, where their toy soldiers fight Napoleon and no one dies. This make-believe land helps the four escape from a harsh reality: Charlotte and Emily are being sent away to a dangerous boarding school, a school they might not return from. But on this Beastliest Day, the day Anne and Branwell walk their sisters to the train station, something incredible happens: the train whisks them all away to a real Glass Town, and the children trade the moors for a wonderland all their own.

This is their Glass Town, exactly like they envisioned it... almost. They certainly never gave Napoleon a fire-breathing porcelain rooster instead of a horse. And their soldiers can die; wars are fought over the potion that raises the dead, a potion Anne would very much like to bring back to England. But when Anne and Branwell are kidnapped, Charlotte and Emily must find a way to save their siblings. Can two English girls stand against Napoleon’s armies, especially now that he has a new weapon from the real world? And if he escapes Glass Town, will England ever be safe again?

***

Having brought The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making all the way home with the fabulous final volume of said series last year, Catherynne M. Valente is back with another magical middle-grade fantasy primed to delight younger and older readers alike.

The Glass Town Game takes its name from what is initially a bit of whimsy: a make-believe battle between twelve toy soldiers and whatever creeping evil its creative wee heroes conceive. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne are all itty bitty Brontës, but together, if you please, you can call them the Bees. And when the Bees wish to escape the weight of the world—a world in which they've already lost their beloved mother and two of their sisters who got sick at School—they take to the room at the top of the stairs of their upstanding father's parsonage:

It was hardly more than a drafty white closet, nestled like a secret between Papa's room and Aunt Elizabeth's. But the four children ruled over it as their sovereign kingdom. They decreed, once and for all, that no person taller than a hat-stand could disturb their territory, on penalty of not being spoken to for a week. (p.6)

At play, the Bees are at least at peace, but when The Glass Town Game begins, the Beastliest Day—the day when Charlotte and Emily are to be sent away—is almost upon them.

"Though School had already devoured two of them, Papa was determined that his daughters should be educated. So that they could go into service, he said, so that they could become governesses, and produce an income of their own." (p.18) This was not so deplorable a goal in the early nineteenth century of the Brontës' upbringing, but none of the Bees—excepting perhaps Branwell, the lone boy of the bunch—have anything nice to say about the Beastliest Day. Indeed, they dread it—not because it may be the death of them, as it was for Maria and Lizzie, their much-missed big sisters, but because it shall surely signal the last gasp of Glass Town.

As it happens, however, there's one last adventure for the girls (and the bully of a boy they sometimes feel they've been burdened with) to have in the realm they created in the room at the top of the stairs, and it promises to be an adventure like none other—an adventure that beggars belief, even.

Book Review | Caraval by Stephanie Garber

Scarlett has never left the tiny isle of Trisda, pining from afar for the wonder of Caraval, a once-a-year week-long performance where the audience participates in the show.

Caraval is Magic. Mystery. Adventure. And for Scarlett and her beloved sister Tella it represents freedom and an escape from their ruthless, abusive father.

When the sisters' long-awaited invitations to Caraval finally arrive, it seems their dreams have come true. But no sooner have they arrived than Tella vanishes, kidnapped by the show's mastermind organiser, Legend.

Scarlett has been told that everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. But nonetheless she quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous game of love, magic and heartbreak. And real or not, she must find Tella before the game is over, and her sister disappears forever.

***

The circus been the subject of some remarking writing in recent years, from the marvellously moving Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti to The Night Circus' unbridled delight, so I came to Caraval—a book about which there has much such buzz—with hope of happiness in my heart. Sadly, Stephanie Garber's debut is more like a watered-down Water For Elephants than either of the efforts aforementioned.

"It took seven years to get the letter right." (p.3) Seven years of begging and pleading. Seven years of congratulations and salutations. Scarlett tried asking the master of Caraval for tickets to the greatest show the world has known on her own behalf—alas, he didn't answer. She tried intimating that it would be her darling little sister's wish to play the planet's greatest game—but no dice were ever delivered. Perversely, then, it was only when Scarlett wrote to tell Legend that her imminent marriage meant she'd no longer be able to attend in any event that an invitation finally came in the mail.

Three invitations arrive, actually: one for her, one for her mysterious husband-to-be, and one for her no longer so little sister Tella. When that latter sees Legend's letter, she does her utmost to convince Scarlett to take him up on his offer:

Nothing we do is safe. But this is worth the risk. You've waited your whole life for this, wished on every fallen star, prayed as every ship came into port that it would be that magical one carrying the mysterious Caraval performers. You want this more than I do. (pp.18-19)

She does, to be sure. But Scarlett is deeply afraid of her father. She's afraid of what he would do, to her and to Tella too, if she leaves the conquered island of Trisda. You see, she's tried to, in the past. She's tried, and failed, and a good man died at her hateful father's hands because of the mistake she made. She's simply not willing to make another, especially because attending Caraval for the week it takes to complete would mean missing the wedding ceremony her father has gone out of his way to arrange. It might be to a man Scarlett has not yet met, and he might also be a monster, but at least she and her sister will be out of harm's way after her big day.

So it's a no. A no Tella disregards entirely. She has her own suitor, a sultry sailor name Julian, subdue Scarlett and spirit her off to la Isla de los Sueños—"the island of dreams" (p.46) where Caraval is poised to take place. When she comes to a couple of days later, Scarlett wants nothing more than to turn back to Trisda, but she can't countenance leaving her sister, and Tella has already traded in her ticket. To wit, to find her, Scarlett—and Julian as her fake fiance—have no choice but to follow in her footsteps. Thus the game begins!

Book Review | Long Dark Dusk by J. P. Smythe

The moment she learned the horrible truth about her life on Australia, the derelict ship overrun with violent gangs, Chan Aitch made it her mission to save everyone she could from their fate worse than death. But her efforts were in vain. Now, everyone she cares about is dead or in prison, and Chan is more alone than ever before.

As the only person to have escaped Australia's terrible crash-landing back to Earth, Chan is now living in poverty on the fringes of a huge city. She believes Mae, the little girl she once rescued on the Australia, is still alive—but she has no idea where Mae is, or how to find her. Everything on Earth is strange and new, and Chan has never felt more lost.

But she'll do whatever it takes to find Mae, even if it means going to prison herself. She's broken out of prison before. How hard could it be to do it again?

***

Having horrified and amazed readers in equal measure across the first two volumes of The Anomaly Quartet, and doubled down on darkly character-focused dystopia in The Testament, The Machine and latterly No Harm Can Come to a Good Man, James P. Smythe has gone from strength to strength since his underrated debut in 2010. In so doing, he's demonstrated that he's not just a jack but a master of all the trades he's tried—a mastery that, on the back of last year's Way Down Dark, evidently extends to the young adult market.

Book the first of The Australia Trilogy read, as I said, "like a lesson in how to bring your fiction to a more sensitive sector without sacrificing the parts that made it remarkable." It didn't talk down to its audience. It didn't diminish the darker parts of its narrative. It didn't hold back in any measurable sense.

To discuss Long Dark Dusk, nor can I. I have to hit on what happened in the last act of Way Down Dark. I have to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the Australia.

The thousand-some souls aboard the Australia believed it to be a generation ship blazing a trail through space in search of a world where humanity, having bled Earth dead, might put down renewed roots. They were wrong. In actual fact, the Australia was a prison ship in stationary orbit around the very planet its inhabitants thought they'd left so long ago; a planet, ravaged but not ruined by environmental catastrophe, whose people, roughly a hundred years hence, see that positively apocalyptic period as little more than a bump in the road. As an embarrassment, even.

To wit, when Way Down Dark's central character Chan managed to crash-land the ailing Australia just outside of walled-off Washington, she and the scant other survivors of the disaster weren't exactly welcomed:

I was meant to step off the ship, having saved the lives of the people I cared about, the good people who did nothing wrong, who didn't deserve the fate—the curse—that had been put upon them. I was meant to look back at everything I had lost—my mother; my childhood; even Agatha, so recently departed—and still see something resembling the future I had dreamt of. Mae would be there and we would be a family. Family is what you make it; that's something I learned. It's not blood. It runs deeper than that, and stronger.

That's how it was meant to go.

But it didn't. (p.105)

Book Review | The Light That Gets Lost by Natasha Carthew

A small boy hiding in a cupboard witnesses something no child should ever see. He tries not to look but he still hears it. And when he comes out, there's no mistaking. His mum and dad have been killed. And though he's only small, he swears that he'll get revenge one day.

Years later, Trey goes to a strange camp that is meant to save troubled teenagers. It's packed with crazies, god-botherers, devoted felons and broken kids. Trey's been in and out of trouble ever since the day the bad thing happened, but he's not here for saving: this is where he'll find the man who did it. Revenge and healing, salvation and hell are a boiling, dangerous mix, and Trey finds himself drawn to a girl, a dream and the offer of friendship in the dark .

***

When you think about it, the business of living boils down to a string of decisions; seemingly insignificant decisions about little things, largely, like whether to take the left road or the right. Maybe one direction gets you to your destination without delay on this postulated day, and perhaps that matters, but taking the long way could lead, equally, to a chance meeting that leads to laughter that leads, at the last, to love.

What I mean to say is that, in a very real way, we're changed by our choices—made or broken or both. Take Tremain Pearce, the deeply damaged protagonist of Natasha Carthew's languid but ultimately uplifting latest. When a man murders his mother and father, and hurts his big brother Billy so seriously that he'll require round-the-clock care for the remainder of his days, Trey chooses to make the guy who got away with it pay: a decision that determines the lot of his lamentable life from that sickening instant on.

His short life, sketched and drawn wrong since memory began, had been rubbed down to this one moment in time; he was sitting at the brink of a place where there was no turning back and he was ready to jump. For Mum and Dad and Billy he was ready to leap into the unknown and all he knew of that unknown was it had one single solitary name and the name was revenge. (p.5)

In the name of revenge, then, Trey contrives a transfer from his foster family into the care of Camp Kernow, a faith-based prison facility which purports to teach difficult children a trade, where he has reason to believe the man who took his family from him has sought safety "in the cloth of God." (p.6)

Book Review | The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness

What if you aren't the Chosen One? The one who's supposed to fight the zombies, or the soul-eating ghosts, or whatever this new thing is, with the blue lights and the death?

What if you're like Mikey, who just wants to graduate and go to prom and maybe finally work up the courage to ask Henna out before someone goes and blows up the high school—again. 

And what if there are problems bigger than this week's end of the world, and sometimes you just have to find the extraordinary in your ordinary life? Even if your best friend might just be the God of mountain lions...

***

In the suggestive sentence attached to the first chapter of The Rest of Us Just Live Here, "the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate." (p.9)

The world is ending again, evidently. But never mind the Messenger—the impending apocalypse its presence heralds is not the point of Patrick Ness' latest revelation. There are indeed dark times ahead for the friends of indie kid Finn—this Immortals nonsense will lead to any number of melodramatic deaths—but the household heroes of The Rest of Us Just Live Here are safely outside of said circle.

That's not to say their days lack drama, or tragedy, but like you and me, reader, rather than the saviours at the centre of so many Chosen One stories, just living keeps them plenty busy.

We yearn the same, wish the same. We're just as screwed-up and brave and false and loyal and wrong and right as anyone else. And even if there's no one in my family or my circle of friends who's going to be the Chosen One or the Beacon of Peace or whatever the hell it's going to be next time around, I reckon there are a lot more people like me than there are indie kids with unusual names and capital-D Destinies. (p.35)

"Your humble narrator" (p.55) Mikey Mitchell has hit the nail on the head, here, and the notion that normal is not the same as insignificant informs every last aspect of the new novel from the mind behind A Monster Calls.

Book Review | Way Down Dark by J. P. Smythe

There's one truth on the Australia: you fight or you die. Usually both.

Imagine a nightmare from which there is no escape. Seventeen-year-old Chan's ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one.

The only life that Chan's ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive in a hell where no one can hide. The Australia is a ship of death, of murderers and cults and gangs.

But way down dark—into a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead—there might be a way to escape.

***

Calling all authors with plans to ply their darker brands in the young adult market: Way Down Dark is like a lesson in how to bring your fiction to a more sensitive sector without sacrificing the parts that made it remarkable.

The sensational start of J. P. Smythe's Australia trilogy is to sinister science fiction what Joe Abercrombie's Shattered Sea series has been to fantasy of the grimdark variety: a nearly seamless segue that doesn't talk down to its audience or substantially scale back the stuff some say is sure to scare younger readers away.

To wit, it doesn't get a great deal more miserable than this—appropriately given the tone and tenor of Smythe's other efforts. Consider the fact that Way Down Dark opens on its main character murdering her own mother a macabre case in point.

It was because she had a reputation. Her reputation meant that I was always left alone, because so many others on the ship were scared of her. Only when she became sick did that change. Not that anybody knew what was wrong with her for sure, but there were rumours. Rumours are nearly worse than the truth, because they get out of control. People started looking at me differently, pushing their luck, sizing me up. They wanted to see just how weak she was now, and how weak I was. [...] Power is everything on Australia. Power is how they rule; it's how they take territory, make parts of the ship their own. But, somehow, our section of the ship stayed free. Somehow—and part of me wants to lay the responsibility at my mother's feet, though I know it can't all have been her doing—we stayed out of it. (p6)

And so a plan is hatched, to keep the three free sections of the ship safe by showing the Lows that Chan and the others under her mother's purported protection should be taken very seriously indeed.

Book Review | The Death House by Sarah Pinborough

Toby's life was perfectly normal... until it was unravelled by something as simple as a blood test.

Taken from his family, Toby now lives in the Death House; an out-of-time existence far from the modern world, where he, and the others who live there, are studied by Matron and her team of nurses. They're looking for any sign of sickness. Any sign of their wards changing. Any sign that it's time to take them to the sanatorium.

And no one returns from the sanatorium.

Withdrawn from his house-mates and living in his memories of the past, Toby spends his days fighting his fear. But then a new arrival in the house shatters the fragile peace, and everything changes.

Because everybody dies. It's how you choose to live that counts.

***

A slim, sorrowful volume that splits the difference between The Fault in Our Stars and The Girl with All the Gifts, The Death House documents the last days of several students in a school full of Defectives: young people who have been taken from their parents and installed in an isolated location because of something bad in their blood. Something that'll kill them all before long.

It's school but not school. Like this whole place is life but not life. At least the teachers, who disappear off to their own wing once lessons are done, will get out of here. Sometimes I'll catch one watching us as we work as if we're animals in a zoo. I can never decide quite what the look is. Fascination or fear, or maybe a bit of both.

Maybe a bit of both is appropriate...

On the back of The Language of Dying, a life-affirming dark fantasy about the passing of a man with lung cancer, Sarah Pinborough opts not to detail the Defective gene here. That isn't to say there aren't certain suggestions—implications that when the time comes, the kids in question will turn into monsters of a sort; monsters some of them have seen in the movies the school screens each week. To wit, we can guess what happens next. We can guess that death is essentially a blessing on the affected.

The kids struggle to see it that way, because of course they do—they're kids. Boys and girls from eight to eighteen bundled into black vans and largely left to their own devices on an island where they make friends and enemies, fight and make light; where they do whatever they can do, in truth, to avoid facing the fate that awaits them.

Book Review | TimeBomb by Scott K. Andrews

New York City, 2141: Yojana Patel throws herself off a skyscraper, but never hits the ground.

Cornwall, 1640: gentle young Dora Predennick, newly come to Sweetclover Hall to work, discovers a badly-burnt woman at the bottom of a flight of stairs. When she reaches out to comfort the dying woman, she's flung through time.

On a rainy night in present-day Cornwall: seventeen-year-old Kaz Cecka sneaks into the long-abandoned Sweetclover Hall, in search of a dry place to sleep. Instead he finds a frightened housemaid who believes Charles I is king and an angry girl who claims to come from the future.

Thrust into the centre of a war that spans millennia, Dora, Kaz and Jana must learn to harness powers they barely understand to escape not only villainous Lord Sweetclover but the forces of a fanatical army... all the while staying one step ahead of a mysterious woman known only as Quil.

***

Three teens from three times run rampant in 17th century Cornwall in the frenetic first volume of Scott K. Andrews' TimeBomb trilogy, a paradoxical romp which, whilst engaging and entertaining, promises a little more than it delivers.

To wit, TimeBomb begins quite brilliantly, with a fleeting glimpse of future New York: a sprawling city in which forty-storey superstructures are "dwarfed by the looming organic skytowns that twined sinuously up into the cloud base." (p.3) Here, we meet Yojana Patel, the determinedly independent daughter of... a powerful politician, I think?

We can't be certain because Andrews doesn't dally. In a matter of moments, rather than give her pursuers the satisfaction of catching her, Jana has thrown herself off the roof of a great skyscraper.

Death, in her day, is merely an inconvenience—she has a state-of-the-art board embedded in her head to that exact effect—but this particular passing doesn't happen as planned. Jana, in fact, never lands.

Instead, a second or two into her fall, she felt a tug upwards. Her first thought was that it was a freak gust of wind momentarily slowing her descent, but the tug increased. It felt as if the gravity that pulled her down was fighting an opposite force that wanted to pull her skywards. 

She opened her eyes and gasped. She was hovering in mid-air, surrounded by a halo of coruscating bright red sparks, like some kind of human firework. [...] Jana was so surprised by this that it took her a moment to realise that the world around her was darkening, as if a huge cloud was blocking out the sun. (pp.16-17)

In short, she goes into freefall—through time as opposed to space—before awakening, shaken, in the present day. Here, Jana joins forces with runaway called Kaz, who has been drawn almost inexorably towards Sweetclover Hall. As has Dora Predennick, a quiet Cornish lass from the past who, "in spite of all her natural meekness, humility and stay-at-home unadventurousness [...] was very formidable indeed when she was angry." (p.31) And having been forcibly transported over a time bridge, as she sees it, Dora's... pretty pissed.

Book Review | Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld

Darcy Patel has put college on hold to publish her teen novel, Afterworlds. With a contract in hand, she arrives in New York City with no apartment, no friends, and all the wrong clothes. But lucky for Darcy, she’s taken under the wings of other seasoned and fledgling writers who help her navigate the city and the world of writing and publishing. Over the course of a year, Darcy finishes her book, faces critique, and falls in love.

Woven into Darcy’s personal story is her novel, Afterworlds, a suspenseful thriller about a teen who slips into the “Afterworld” to survive a terrorist attack. The Afterworld is a place between the living and the dead, and where many unsolved—and terrifying—stories need to be reconciled. Like Darcy, Lizzie too falls in love... until a new threat resurfaces, and her special gifts may not be enough to protect those she cares about most.

***

As someone somewhen almost certainly said, the story is the thing... and it is, isn't it? Most readers read in order to know what happens next—to these characters or that narrative—rather than out of interest in much of anything outwith a given fiction; assuredly not the particular process of authors, though after Afterworlds, I've begun to wonder whether we mightn't be missing a trick.

A twofold story about storytelling, Scott Westerfeld's insightful new novel alternates between a pair of coming of age tales. In one, we meet Lizzie: a typical teenager, to begin with, who's too busy texting to notice the start of a terrorist attack:

I'd never heard an automatic weapon in real life before. It was somehow too loud for my ears to register, not so much a sound as the air ripping around me, a shudder I could feel in my bones and in the liquid of my eyes. I looked up from my phone and stared. 

The gunmen didn't look human. They wore horror movie masks, and smoke flowed around them as they swung their aim across the crowd. [...] I didn't hear the screams until the terrorists paused to reload. (pp.5-6)

Luckily, Lizzie comes to her senses eventually. As quietly as she can, she calls 911 as the bullets fly by. The operator on the other end of the telephone tells Lizzie her best bet is to play dead, and in lieu of a safer location, she does exactly that.

A touch too well, in truth, because she faints, and awakens in another world. There, in the land of the no longer living—a grayscale place where "the air [tastes] flat and metallic" (p.20)—she promptly falls for a foxy psychopomp:

These terrorists had tried to kill me but I'd gone to the land of the dead and now could see ghosts and apparently had acquired dangerous new powers and this boy, this boy had touched my fingertips—and they still tingled. (p.76)

In the aftermath of the attack, it beggars belief, a bit, that this boy is Lizzie's priority. Not the loss of so much life. Not her own nearness to nothing. Not even the realisation that she can move between worlds at will. Rather, Yamaraj, "a hot Vedic death god" (p.77) "modeled [...] on a Bollywood star" (p.121) by his faithless creator, debutant Darcy Patel.

Book Review | The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey

How do you rid the Earth of seven billion humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Surviving the first four waves was nearly impossible. Now Cassie Sullivan finds herself in a new world, a world in which the fundamental trust that binds us together is gone. As the 5th Wave rolls across the landscape, Cassie, Ben, and Ringer are forced to confront the Others’ ultimate goal: the extermination of the human race.

Cassie and her friends haven’t seen the depths to which the Others will sink, nor have the Others seen the heights to which humanity will rise, in the ultimate battle between life and death, hope and despair, love and hate.

***

Following the first phases of the invasion revealed in Rick Yancey's breakthrough book, the world of The 5th Wave "is a clock winding down," (p.1) with each tick of which, and every tock, what little hope there is left is lost.

No one knows exactly how long the last remnants of humanity have, but they're looking at a matter of months, at most... unless someone, somewhere, can conceive of a means of driving the aliens away—aliens who, as the big bad of the series says, have nowhere else to go.

"You've lost your home," Vosch asks The Infinite Sea's central character—not Cassie, as it happens—to imagine. "And the lovely one—the only one—that you've found to replace it is infested with vermin. What can you do? What are your choices? Resign yourself to live peaceably with the destructive pests or exterminate them before they can destroy your new home?" (p.201)

Guest Post | "Om-Nom-Omnigenre" by Tom Pollock

"Oh really, how cool, you wrote a book?"

"Yes. Well, a trilogy actually."

"Oh cool, what genre is it?"

"YA. YA Urban Fantasy. YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia. YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia Post-Apocalypse."

"YA Urban...?"

"YA Urban Fantasy Dystopia Post-Apocalypse?"

"More or less."

At that point the conversation usually dries up. My interlocutor necks the rest of their wine, and suddenly remembers they have somewhere else important to be, but I swear it’s true. The Skyscraper Throne trilogy, my series about a teenaged graffiti artist and her poet best friend pulled into a world of runaway train ghosts, living reflections and crane fingered demolition gods, really is of all these genres, and maybe more.

Genre, you see, is a taxonomy, a periodic table for literature, but the truth is, almost all books are compounds, not individual elements. But while which genres to file a particular story under is ultimately up to the reader, it’s the writer who gets to choose the tropes they’ll use to judge it.

But how to choose? Tropes are just story elements—all that marks them out as special is the frequency with which we use them. For me, the first element in any story is the theme. Theme is just a fancy word for ‘what the story’s about,’ and my themes... they kind of snowballed.

The first thing I knew about the trilogy, you see, was that I wanted to tell a story about growing up, so YA made sense. The City’s Son was about two girls pulled into a magical world hidden beneath the skin of everyday London. This is an Urban Fantasy trope so tropey that it barely even registers—it’s practically definitional of the genre—but it’s also as neat a metaphor for one’s first, faltering steps into adulthood as I can think of: a world at once strange and familiar, exciting and frightening, that you’ve lived in every day of your life but never really seen until now.

In the second novel—The Glass Republic—our scarred protagonist is pulled into an aesthetic dictatorship, a parallel city inside reflections where the full measure of your worth is judged by your face, and the standards of beauty are set by a proud and ruthless Mirrorstocracy. Again, the core idea of a repressive regime is hardly original, but the resonance of a teen testing themselves against the rules and limits of their new world, and deciding how much they will shape those limits and how far they’ll allow them to shape them... for me that was the perfect second act.

And the final apocalyptic act? Bringing the world-that-is-London to the brink of destruction by an urban plague: streets running at 1000 degree fevers, windows and doors vanishing to leave citizens sealed up in brick, solid roads turning in an instant to a liquid so thin you can’t swim in it, just sink and let it fill your nostrils? 

All that is because when you’ve grown up—really grown up—you can never go home again.

Maybe that’s why I think of being grown-up (past tense) as a synonym for death.

Anyway, that’s how one series gets to be in (at least) four sub genres. So I’ll throw it over to you, dear internet friend, what’s your favourite genre: horror? Police procedural? Romance? And much more importantly—what do those genres say to you?

***

Inventor of monsters and hugger of bears, Tom Pollock writes fantasy, and writes about fantasy. Say hey to him on twitter @tomhpollock or by way of his website.

Book Review | Katya's War by Jonathan L. Howard

The battle lines have been drawn. The people of Russalka turn upon one another in a ruthless and unwavering civil war even while their world sickens and the deep black ocean is stained red with their blood. As the young civilisation weakens, its vitality fuelling the opposing militaries at the cost of all else, the war drums beat louder and louder.

Katya Kuriakova knows it cannot last. Both sides are exhausted. It can only be a matter of days or weeks before they finally call a truce and negotiate. But the days and weeks pass, the death toll mounts, and still the enemy will not talk. Then a figure from the tainted past returns to make her an offer she cannot lightly refuse: a plan to stop the war. But to do it she will have to turn her back on everything she has believed in, everything she has ever fought for, to make sacrifices greater even than laying down her own life.

To save Russalka, she must become its greatest enemy.

***

In an appealing and endearing departure from his dark comedy novels starring the necromancer and detective Johannes Cabal, Jonathan L. Howard engineered a wonderful underwater world in the fun-filled first volume of The Russalka Chronicles.

Katya's World introduced us to a girl who had to grow up fast when she was drawn into a conflict that spiralled out of control quickly, and has continued to do so since. Colonised by human forces many moons ago before being abandoned, and at the last attacked, Russalka was recently rocked by an uprising of rebels determined to wrest control from the FMA. It follows, then, that in Katya's War, we see this world at its worst.

The world had been much simpler then. Now, however... now she'd seen the kind of people who start wars at first hand. The experience had not filled her with confidence that they would be doing everything in their power to bring things to a peaceful conclusion. The FMA was furious with the Yagizban because the Yags had betrayed them not once but twice, first conspiring with the Terrans during the war, and then by preparing for a Terran return that never came. For their part, the Yagizban were sick of the Federals for getting into a war with Earth in the first place, and then using it as an excuse for never-ending martial law. They would fight like zmey over a manta-whale carcass, until one of them was dead, and the manta was torn to pieces. (p.46)

Very sensibly, Katya has kept her own council since the war kicked off. Just making her meagre ends meet has been enough to keep busy with, and were it not for the insistence of a few familiar faces, she'd have been happy to keep at this neverending quest for cargo to transport.

The legendary Yagizban pirates Havilland Kane and Tasya Morevna have other plans for her, however. They capture Kayta and forcibly escort her to a fallen facility where the awful cost of the war is in evidence: the bodies of innocent men, women and children are everywhere. Why? She can't help but wonder. And for what?

Book Review | Marina by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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In May 1980, 15-year-old Oscar Drai suddenly vanishes from his boarding school in the old quarter of Barcelona. For seven days and nights no one knows his whereabouts...

His story begins in the heart of old Barcelona, when he meets Marina and her father German Blau, a portrait painter. Marina takes Oscar to a cemetery to watch a macabre ritual that occurs on the fourth Sunday of each month. At 10 a.m. precisely a coach pulled by black horses appears. From it descends a woman dressed in black, her face shrouded, wearing gloves, holding a single rose. She walks over to a gravestone that bears no name, only the mysterious emblem of a black butterfly with open wings.

When Oscar and Marina decide to follow her they begin a journey that will take them to the heights of a forgotten, post-war Barcelona, a world of aristocrats and actresses, inventors and tycoons; and a dark secret that lies waiting in the mysterious labyrinth beneath the city streets.

***

Upon its original publication, The Shadow of the Wind was something of a sensation in Spain, and again times ten — thanks in no small part to Lucia Graves' great translation — when it was let loose in the West damn near a decade ago.

Sadly, the going's been ever so slow as regards new novels by Carlos Ruiz Zafón since. There was The Angel's Game in 2009 — a bit of a disappointment, if I'm honest — and in 2012, The Prisoner of Heaven: a worthy sequel to The Shadow of the Wind, if not necessarily an equal. Be that as it may, I can hardly wait to read the concluding volume of the Cemetery cycle... but I'm going to have to, aren't I?

In the meantime, there's been plenty to keep Zafón's army of fans happy, because between these releases, Lucia Graves has been working her way through the novels the master of post-modern melodrama made his name with in the nineties: a series of four young adult fantasies beginning with The Prince of Mist — a pleasant if forgettable blip of a book — and concluding, this year, with Marina.

Set in the late 1970s in beautiful, byzantine Barcelona — an enchanted city wherein "time and memory, history and fiction merged [...] like watercolours in the rain" (p.5) — Marina tells the tale of Oscar Drai's missing days. "Then a fifteen-year-old boy languishing in a boarding school named after some half-forgotten saint," (p.5) at the outset Oscar meets a secretive girl called Marina and her ailing father, Germán. They become fast friends... though, you know, only on the down low:

Without knowing quite why, I kept the friendship hidden. I hadn't told anyone about them, not even my friend JF. In just a few weeks Germán and Marina had become my secret life and in all honesty the only life I wished to live. I remember the time when Germán went to bed early, excusing himself as usual with the impeccably manners of an old-fashioned gentleman. I was left alone with Marina in the room with the portraits. She smiled enigmatically. (pp.70-71)

As it happens, she has a habit of doing that; that and many other mysterious things. She has a secret, you see — several, strictly speaking — and one day she clues Oscar in on the gothic plot Zafón's novel revolves around. It begins at the Sarria cemetery, one of Barcelona's best-hidden spots:

If you look for it on the map, you won't find it. If you ask locals or taxi drivers how to get there, they probably won't know, although they'll have heard all about it. And if, by chance, you try to look for it on your own, you're more likely than not to get lost. The lucky few who know the secret of its whereabouts suspect that this old graveyard is in fact an island lost in the ocean of the past, which appears and disappears at random. 

This was the setting to which Marina let me that Sunday in September, to reveal a mystery that intrigued me almost as much as she did. (p.29)

To be sure, I was taken in too, for from their vantage point, Oscar and Marina watch a hooded woman pray before a grave unmarked excepting a simple symbol: a black butterfly with open wings. Perplexed, our intrepid adventurers stick their noses in still further, and resolve to follow the hooded woman home. When she disappears into an overgrown greenhouse, they head in unhesitating — and that's where the innocent fun finishes, because deep in the greenhouse, Oscar and Marina find an entrance to a subterranean inner sanctum of sorts, where they discover an obscenely creepy collection of dolls along with a macabre photo album depicting "innocent souls imprisoned within bodies that were horribly deformed." (p.41)

Intriguing, indeed. Alas, the mystery doesn't last. Marina may be the finest of Zafón's four young adult fantasies —  it is certainly the most reminiscent of the territory the author went on to explore in the Cemetery cycle — but it, too, has significant issues. Foremost among them, by far, is this; the end result of which is, I'm sorry to say, some faux-Phantom of the Opera nonsense. To make matters worse, Marina's riddles are revealed piecemeal by way of a series of increasingly convoluted monologues, for instance the following:

"All the former members of the Velo-Granell executive board met their deaths, theoretically of natural causes. Heart attack was the doctor's diagnosis in most of the cases. One of them drown in his own swimming pool. The body was still holding a gun when they fished him out. For the rest the circumstances were similar. They'd been alone in their beds; it was always at midnight; and they were all found in process of dragging themselves across the floor... trying to flee from a death that left no trace. All except Benjamín Sentís." (p.158-159)

Markedly more satisfying than the central mystery of Marina are the relationships between Oscar and Marina, Marina and her father, even Marina's father and our able narrator. A piquant combination of sweetness and silliness and sadness elevates their early interactions above and beyond the norm. Unfortunately, these too take a backseat when the twisted riddle begins to unravel, though the very last chapters represent something of a saving grace.

Marina's primary problem is far from fundamental, but it does undoubtedly take the edge off a novel I was looking forward to recommending unreservedly as far as two thirds through. As is, Marina might be slightly more satisfying than Carlos Ruiz Zafon's other young adult fantasies — a largely lacklustre bunch — but in the final summation it falls short of the promise of its premise and an absolutely fantastic first act.

***

Marina
by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

UK Publication: September 2013, Weidenfeld & Nicolson

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Book Review | The Devil's Apprentice by Jan Siegel

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The Devil is retiring... but who’s taking over?

When teenage Pen inherits the job of caretaker for a London building with no doors and only a secret entrance from the caretaker’s lodge — which she must never use — little does she know it will lead her into unbelievable danger. For Azmordis, also known as Satan, a spirit as old as Time and as powerful as the Dark, Immortality is running out.

In the house with no front door, a group of teenagers are trapped in assorted dimensions of myth and history, undergoing the trials that will shape them to step into his cloven footwear — or destroy them. Assisted by only by an aspiring teenage chef called Gavin and Jinx, a young witch with more face-piercing than fae-power, Pen must try to stop the Devil’s deadly game plan — before it’s too late.

***

A dead man lives in Temporal Crescent. A Mr. Andrew Pyewackett, to be precise. He passed away seven years before the events of The Devil's Apprentice, but he's stuck around since to be sure that the unholy house he spent his lifetime looking after is left to someone sensible, someone undaunted by its particular... idiosyncrasies.

He has the ideal man in mind — Bartlemy Goodman, of no fixed above — alas, no one has been able to find the fellow, and in the period his lax lawyers have been looking, Pyewackett has gone to pieces. Quite literally. As he admits, "I simply can't go on like this. [...] Flesh and blood won't stand it. Let's face it, they aren't meant to. Look at me, I'm already falling to bits — every time I remove my socks several toes fall off. I need to get out of this body and move on. Arrangements will have to be made." (p.14)

These arrangements are as strange as the circumstances which made them a must. Pyewackett instructs the family firm to appoint Penelope Anne Tudor — Pen to you and me — as interim executor of his remaining estate. She's to move into the adjoining property, which comes complete with a brilliant butler and its very own pair of haunted falsers, the better to continue the search for the lost legatee.

Thing of it is, Pen's only thirteen, and her grandmother will never go along with this madness... will she?

She would never be allowed to stay in Temporal Crescent and do her job. And she wanted to. She wanted it more than anything in her life. It was maturity, responsibility, freedom. She had decided she wasn't worried about the danger element — a house surely couldn't be dangerous, with or without a front door. Whatever might happen, she would handle it. 

If she got the chance. (p.40)

She gets the chance.

Let us pause before we talk about the plot proper to consider this: one of my only problems with what is otherwise a magnificent new novel. Pen's gran is an absolute pushover. She takes precious little convincing in the first instance, is largely absent after the fact, and when there's a murder outside 7A several weeks later, dear old Eve expresses her regrets and then simply goes about her business. Which seems, in short, to be shopping.

This is one of the genre's peculiar problems. Reminiscent of modern horror's struggle to strand its characters in isolated environments in a world where such places are truly few and far between, the YA narrative must arrange, often implausibly, for its pubescent protagonists to be let loose by the adults in charge of their care; adults who would in all probability spoil the fun for everyone. In The Devil's Apprentice, Jan Siegel simply dismisses the need for a decent rationale as to why Pen and her pals can run riot, and that did bother me a bit.

Besides this, though, The Devil's Apprentice is fantastic fun, especially once we find out what the house is all about. No. 7 Temporal Crescent isn't haunted, as it happens. Instead:

"It's something called a space/time prison," Pen said. "I don't know what that is, but all the doors open on different bits of the past, or magical dimensions, and if you go through you'll get lost, sort of absorbed into history. Like if you're in the eighteenth century, that's where you think you belong. It stops people going around changing the course of events." (p.92)

As soon as Pyewackett passes on, Pen sets about investigating No. 7 in earnest. By the time Gavin Lester let himself into the adjoining quarters she's already been attacked by a velociraptor, so Pen is happy for him to help. He's looking for Bartlemy Goodman too — Gavin believes Bartlemy may be the man to teach him how to be Great Britain's best chef — as is Jinx, a little witch who comes a-calling because she's intercepted whispers from double-dealing demons about a unique job opportunity.

No one believes in the Devil any more. He went out of fashion with wimples and witch-trials, made a brief comeback with the powdered wig, the bal masque and the Marquis de Sade, popped up in the London smog somewhere between the crinoline and the bustle, and vanished for good into a world of kitsch horror films in the mid/late twentieth century. Evil went on, of course, but Evil is made by humans; we need no supernatural help for that. But there is someone who feeds off our evil — who feeds it and feeds off it — the Rider of Nightmares, the Eater of Souls, the God of Small Print, and if he no longer wears horns and a tail that is merely a matter of style. Modern thinking belittles him, superstition touches wood for him, children dance around his maypole — but never widdershins, always with the sun. He hides in folktale and fear, in legends and lies — don't speak his name, or he may hear you, don't whistle, or he may come to you. If you believe in fairies, don't clap, for there are darker things than the sidhe in the World Beyond Midnight. Call him a myth, call him a fantasy, for myth and fantasy do no exist. 

He exists. (pp.49)

He indubitably does in The Devil's Apprentice, and indeed, he's looking to train his eventual successor, who he's decided must come from the mortal realm.

To be completely clear, Jinx doesn't want the job: she wants to stop whoever does. Because better the devil you know, you know?

She and Gavin and Pen are in any event a terrific trio of troublemakers who work wonderfully as one. Pen is our resident sceptic. Pyewackett hiring her "was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her, except she didn't believe in magic. Unlike her friends, she didn't read fantasy books — in fact, she read very little fiction at all since she couldn't see the point of it, though her grandmother had ensured she had a basic knowledge of all the classics. But Pen preferred facts. [...] In her view, imagination just got you into trouble." (p.24) Jinx the witch is by definition Pen's polar opposite, though they get on pretty well for all that, whilst she and Martin are at odds with one another from the first, which needless to say leads to some smartly barbed banter.

In Jan Siegel's capable hands the entirety of The Devil's Apprentice is rather smart, in fact. The novel's long chapters are punctuated by ominous interludes set elsewhere and elsewhen which do a great job of enlivening the story's more mundane moments... though there are few of these, in truth. Accordingly, the plot is a joy: the premise all potential — above and beyond what goes on in this novel — and in execution even better, equal parts chilling and thrilling.

Take, say, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman as a base. Fold in a little K. J. Parker, perhaps, and fill with Jasper Fforde a la The Last Dragonslayer. Season to taste with finely ground J. K. Rowling and serve with a generous helping of Diana Wynne Jones' wonderful whimsy. It may be that I've been mainlining The Great British Bake Off in recent weeks, but Gavin — the would-be cook of this delectable new book — would approve, I'm sure.

Jan Siegel has been silent, sadly, since the unceremonious sinking of her Sangreal trilogy in 2006. A young adult fantasy for all the family certainly wasn't what I expected from her new novel, but with a hint of the sinister and a smidgen of silliness, it's such bloody good fun that it's a pleasure most piquant to welcome her back to the business of witty literature.

Don't go anywhere, eh? Pretty please with a temporal cherry on top!

***

The Devil's Apprentice
by Jan Siegel

UK & US Publication: October 2013, Ravenstone

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Book Review | Winter Damage by Natasha Carthew

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The moor in winter is no place for a girl travelling alone. It's cold out there. There's snow, but it's the wind that grabs hold of your heart and freezes it.

Just before Christmas, Ennor Carne sets out on a quest to find her missing mother. The home she leaves is a broken-down trailer, with her sick dad and her little brother, and a few skinny cows that's left of what was once a family farm. She takes warm clothes, what food she can find, a map and a gun — but nothing, nothing can prepare her for what lies ahead.

Ennor is just fourteen years old. She thinks she knows where she's going and what she's looking for. She doesn't know anything.

***

As abhorrent as the thought is—of billions dead and the world wasted, whether by natural disaster or man-made calamity—it's fair to say that folks today take a certain pleasure in positing the apocalypse.

The appeal is apparent if we begin by admitting that the lot of modern life is lacking; that we are all dissatisfied with ourselves in one way or another. The end of everything, then, represents a chance to change. To break with the people we have been in the past, and be... better, I guess. So the world goes to war and we wonder: will we suddenly discover hidden depths, reserves of inner strength? The polar ice caps melt and overnight we could be leaders—heroes, even!

Fantasising about the apocalypse is a peculiar pastime, perhaps, but not pointless. At the very least, it begs an arresting theoretical question: how would we cope with the end of world as we know it?

Winter Damage's protagonist Ennor Carne counts.

A fourteen year-old farmer's daughter whose dad has seen better days, and whose autistic brother Trip requires round-the-clock care, Ennor takes "comfort in the counting of things." (p.239) To count is of course to take control in some small way, to impose order upon chaos, and there's been a lot of that latter in her life lately.

Since the last outbreak of foot-and-mouth things had turned worse from the top of the country to the bottom. Ennor didn't remember it all so well. She was only seven at the time and losing the prize cattle was the least of their problems once they had lost the farmhouse and the land and her dad went half mad with the misery and then the drugs. (p.7)

Squirrelled away in the wilderness, the Carne family have managed to make ends meet in the seven years since, but now the money's run out, and the council are threatening to take the kids into care while the country descends into a modern-day dark age.

Nearing the end of her teenage tether, Ennor remembers her mother. Her mother, who upped sticks and abandoned the family with a defiant glint in her eye long before the collapse, as if in obscene agreement, of civilised society. Against good reason, Ennor imagines her mother might be able to save them, or at least lend a helping hand.

She knows where she went—not that far away from the farm, in fact—so as opposed to waiting for the world to right itself somehow, she packs a bag, leaves her brother with her best friend Butch, and journeys alone into the wintry wilderness.

Her mother waltzed into her dream with her sanity intact and happiness for everyone was a given. [But] the merry flight of fantasy soon turned shocking and unbearable and Ennor sat balled and cold and insignificant to the world, the past hanging like an old damp coat hooked to the back of a door, lifeless and rotten. She pressed her hands over her eyes and dug her fingers in close to popping, pinning what couldn't be explained to the back of her mind to stop herself from crying. (p.55)

Needless to say, things don't go according to plan. Within hours of setting out she's injured her ankle badly, lost her map, and killed another kid—and winter has only just begun. If Ennor doesn't exhaust her scant supplies and starve, she'll surely freeze to death without shelter. But other people are seeking shelter as well... and other people are to be avoided at all costs.

Not because they've turned into zombies or anything along those lines—let's be clear about that from the start. Indeed, excepting the apocalyptic elements of the premise, there's nothing speculative about this novel at all. Its world is our world, albeit broken, and its people, equally, are our people: good and bad but mostly both, though the desperate times Winter Damage mines have demanded they take desperate measures.

On the surface, the situation is not dissimilar to that Cormac McCarthy explored in The Road: an appropriate point of reference for Winter Damage's first third if you can imagine that haunting tale told from the boy's perspective rather than the man's, and substitute its skeletal North American setting for the ghostly Cornish coast.

That said, Winter Damage is a much more optimistic novel than The Road. A surprising assertion, I'm sure, given how unbearably bleakly it begins, not to mention how horrendous Ennor's early hardships are. But overall, her journey charts a positive path. She makes a fabulous friend, Sonny, who shows her that there's still warmth to be had, however scant; a wonderful world to turn, however far it's fallen. Sonny gives Ennor hope again; instils in her a promise more potent than the prospect that her runaway mother will in any way save the day.

They laughed and Ennor remarked on what a ragtag family they had made and her words brought comfort to the others because that was what they had become. No matter what the future held, they would have that for ever and always stitched between them. (p.249)

Even at its most miserable—and oh, there are many low moments—Winter Damage is a truly beautiful book, bolstered in large part by a delicate cast of characters and a sublime sense of setting, but what sets it apart in the end is its impeccable prose. Hard to believe, really, that this is Natasha Carthew's first novel. She's published three volumes of poetry before, though, and it shows. Her words are carefully weighted: her descriptions, her dialogue, and the dialect in which she renders said inform a multitude of moods marvellously, meanwhile the mounting sound and essential sense of her sentences rings out as right in a manner most novelists never even attempt.

Small but perfectly formed, Winter Damage is the sort of book that begs to be read out loud, even if there's no-one else near to hear it. It's a stone-cold stunner with an uncommonly humble heart, and I urge you to take in into yours, too.

***

Winter Damage
by Natasha Carthew

UK Publication: August 2013, Bloomsbury
US Publication: January 2014, Bloomsbury USA

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Book Review | The Oathbreaker's Shadow by Amy McCulloch

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Fifteen-year-old Raim lives in a world where you tie a knot for every promise that you make. Break that promise and you are scarred for life, and cast out into the desert.

Raim has worn a simple knot around his wrist for as long as he can remember. No one knows where it came from, and which promise of his it symbolises, but he barely thinks about it at all—not since becoming the most promising young fighter ever to train for the elite Yun guard. But on the most important day of his life, when he binds his life to his best friend (and future king) Khareh, the string bursts into flames and sears a dark mark into his skin.

Scarred now as an oath-breaker, Raim has two options: run, or be killed.

***

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: promises are made to be broken. In truth, trust exists to be tested.

We're often called upon to give our word, for what it's worth, but keeping it is never so simple. Of course it can be done, and indeed, we should endeavour to honour as many of the bonds we form as possible. But sometimes, circumstances arise; unavoidable, inescapable circumstances that require us to behave badly in service of the greater good. To do something we have sworn not to, or say what someone else would rather we wouldn't.

I'm sure I sound like someone with a guilty conscience, and perhaps I am. I'd argue that we all are, to a  greater or lesser extent. Thankfully, the consequences of betraying a vow in our world are in nothing compared to what we'd face if we came from Kharein, the capital city of Darhan.

"Kharein itself was shaped like a pentagon and surrounded by a long, low wall. The wall served more as a way to section off the inner city from the masses of yurts that surrounded it than as any means of defence, as Kharein needed little defending. The flat, isolated land that surrounded the city meant that any attacking army could be seen from miles away, and would be met well before it reached the city. On every point of the pentagon stood a tall watchtower, guards keeping a vigilant eye for suspicious plumes of dust. During Festival season, the yurts were scattered around the outside of the city walls, clustered together by clan like white petals around a flower. This was the only time Kharein truly looked alive. Without the visiting population it was simply a dried up bud—the centre of royal activity, perhaps, but not the home of people's hearts. The people of Darhan could not be settled. They moved constantly, shifting with the days of the year, the seasons, the animals. By the end of the month-long Festival even the merriest Darhan grew restless. They dispersed, seeds on the wind, and yet remained unified. It was the life of the Darhan, and had been for centuries." (pp.53-54)

Here, in the authentic desert dynasty Amy McCulloch has dreamed up for her debut, oaths are expressed in physical form. So-called "promise knots" are tied in thread or rope or gold, then worn by both parties. These don't mean a great deal until people reach their Honour Age—when they should be old enough to know better, basically—but beyond that point, forsaking one's faith represents the road to ruin:

"A true promise has serious consequences. Breaking a knotted promise meant excommunication to the desert to live in Lazar, with the community of exiled oathbreakers known as the Chauk. 

"There was no escaping this fate. If it was just a scar you could hide it [...] but it was the shadow that you could not escape. It was the shadow that others saw, judged and sentenced the oathbreaker to exile. It was the shadow that followed you all the way to Lazar and made sure you stayed there. Just the thought of it made Raim shudder." (pp.8-9)

At the outset of The Oathbreaker's Shadow, Raim is an adolescent on the cusp of adulthood, with characteristically grand plans for the future and friends in high places. Friends like Khareh, who is in line to lead Darhan one day as Khan—and on that day, Raim sees himself as Khareh's right hand man, safeguarding the future ruler from any potential threat. In their innocence, the boys simply agree that this will be, thus they tie a promise knot to stress their fidelity.

Fate, however, has other plans for the pair. Raim must become Yun before he can be sworn in as his best friend's Protector, and it will not be easy, even for such a natural talent as he. To make matters worse, Khareh has taken an unhealthy interest in an old man who says he can teach the would-be Khan magic:

"The old stories, passed down by the elders, told of a time when the strongest Khans were the ones with a sage at their right hand, performing magic that gave them the edge on the battlefield. But that was long before even the oldest elder had been born, and for as long as any memory could reach, ever trace of sage magic had disappeared, lost for ever—or so it had seemed." (p.32)

It takes a fair while for the titular oath to be broken, and again for the subsequent shadow to show itself, but I wouldn't describe this debut as slow going. On the contrary, McCulloch makes good use of her first novel's opening act, establishing character and developing setting like an old hand, all while aligning the pieces on the board just so. To wit, when the central premise of the text finally takes centre stage, it presence is very much felt.

The Oathbreaker's Shadow doesn't stop there. McCulloch whisks us around the desert lands of Darhan—to Lazar and back again—like a bona fide tour guide, at such a breakneck pace that if anything I'd have been grateful for a break. But there are sights to be seen, wonders of this world as well, and I'm pleased to have experienced them... though only a few have time to truly take flight.

Similarly, later reversals largely lack the impact of the breakdown of the relationship between Raim and Khareh. Draikh is pretty great, but Wadi—a forgiving Alashan our protagonist takes up with after his inevitable exile—is too transparent a character for her fortunes to mean much.

The Oathbreaker's Shadow is a bunch of fun otherwise. From the germ of an absolutely fascinating idea—our right to wrong; to do ill by others as well as well—Amy McCulloch shapes an undeniably entertaining debut that put me in mind of The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett. And there's every chance The Oathbreaker's Shadow will be just such a success. Sometimes the oldest stories are the ones which take hold of one's imagination most, and the plight of Raim set against the rich tapestry of Darhan is entirely alive in my mind's eye.

In short, bring on book two of this endearing duology. And the sooner the better, especially in light of the absence of an actual ending. The Oathbreaker's Shadow simply pauses at a point—an emerging trend (or am I just noticing it now?) that never fails to frustrate. By design, I dare say, because of course authors want us to want more.

And it's true: I do.

***

The Oathbreaker's Shadow
by Amy McCulloch

UK Publication: June 2013, Doubleday

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