THE SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'The new Game of Thrones' Stylist
'Puts Samantha Shannon in the same league as Robin Hobb and George R.R. Martin. Shannon is a master of dragons' Starburst
‘Epic fantasy with added dragons. A blockbuster’ Guardian, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy
An enthralling, epic fantasy about a world on the brink of war with dragons - and the women who must lead the fight to save it.
A world divided. A queendom without an heir. An ancient enemy awakens.
The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door.
Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic.
Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel.
Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.
Wrong time to pick this up, right after Le Guin. The prose is vague instead of vivid, clumsy instead of precise. 200 pages in, the worldbuilding is still fumbling along, info-dumping as it goes. At the sentence level, it’s not building my trust; I might press on if I had highlighted a line by now, or found a new idea to engage with. But timing is everything, and now I’ve started Fritz Leiber and there’s a whole world alive right there on the first page, so I’ve got to beg off 600 more pages of this.
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20 December, 2019:
Reviewed