![]() Sometimes you wish Tau and his comrades would take longer breaks between both mock and real battles. And the action is unrelenting, at times even overpowering. Winter’s debut novel, already a self-published cult sensation among fantasy fans, is rife with vividly orchestrated battle sequences, whether the fights are between two people or vast armies. Gradually his burning desire for vengeance is all but overpowered by a nascent yearning to bring lasting peace to his battle-scarred land. The further Tau gets into his warrior identity, the more chaotic and complicated the world around him becomes. What Tau learns from her about magic enhances his considerable virtuosity in combat. In the midst of his training, Tau reconnects with his childhood love, Zuri, now among the so-called “Gifted” caste of mystic warriors who help Omehi soldiers fight the Hedeni. Exiled from Kerem, Tau finds his way into a military academy, where his physical prowess and intense diligence soon separate him from other recruits. And when Tau’s father steps in to fight in his son’s place and is killed under a Noble’s command, Tau vows revenge on all who abetted the murder. Even after Nobles and Lessers band together to fight Hedeni marauders and dragons, they battle among themselves for status and honor. And young Tau, who refers to himself as “High Common,” is still considered a “Lesser” even by friends who are placed in the higher “Noble” stratum. Among the Omehi, caste divisions are strictly defined and often brutally enforced. As this saga opens, Tau is a novice swordsman who hails from a rural village called Fief Kerem in a coastal corner of a mythic ancient Africa where the Omehi, or Chosen, people live in ongoing, centurieslong conflict against the Hedeni. To the grand parade of brooding swashbucklers and formidable warriors striding along the thoroughfares of epic fantasy, one can now add the name of Tau Solarin. The swords-and-sorcery genre deepens its presence on the African continent with this rough, tough page-turner replete with demons, dragons, and really bad dreams. The characters, if painted in broad strokes, are vivid and personable, and the brutal landscape, both physical and social, convincingly shapes their destinies.Ī compelling, fast-moving story that grounds fantasy elements in a fascinating period of Russian history. Its outspokenly feminist themes color the story without overwhelming it. ![]() While the novel occasionally falls prey to the typical problems of the second part of a trilogy, awkwardly shoehorning in characters from the first novel and broadly hinting at issues to be resolved in the third, for the most part it stands solidly on its own as an independent work. House and bathhouse spirits play a critical role in the action, and ghosts are as real as Tatar invaders. Arden, who is obviously steeped in knowledge of the history and landscape of medieval Russia, uses that background as a playground for the imagination, creating a world in which the mythical intertwines with the historical. She faces a force even stronger and more malevolent than the human outsiders who threaten Moscow and its rulers. After rescuing several girls stolen from burned-out villages, she makes her way to Moscow, where she finds her sister Olga, now a conservative royal matron, and her brother Sasha, a monk with a swashbuckling side. With the help of the enigmatic frost-demon Morozko, who feels a fatally human attraction to Vasya, the young woman learns to wield a knife and make herself at home in the frozen forest. Vasya, who came of age in Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale (2017), has no plans to settle down after the tragic events that end the first novel. An impetuous young woman disguises herself as a boy and rides a mysterious horse through a lush and forbidding version of medieval Russia in the second novel in a proposed trilogy.
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