The Dragon's Path

Starred review from February 28, 2011
Abraham (the Seasons of War quartet) starts this rich, exciting, and fresh epic fantasy series opener in a fairly standard fashion: an orphaned girl and a once great general escape from a city under siege with the help of a traveling theater troupe. But that's where the clichés end, for Marcus Wester would far rather guard humble caravans than cruel kings, and Cithrin bel Sarcour's loyalty is not to her long-dead noble parents but to the Medean Bank that took her in. Cithrin and Marcus must smuggle the treasury of the lost city of Vanai through a war zone in which every army seeks new sources of funds and every king wants them dead. With a deft and light hand, Abraham questions and explores the fantasy-world assumptions that most authors take for granted, telling an enjoyable and genuinely innovative adventure story along the way.

March 15, 2011

Finally, the bankers get a fantasy that doesn't involve our pension funds.

Inaugurating a new series, prolific fantasy novelist Abraham (A Shadow in Summer, 2006, etc.) draws deeply from the treasure vault of genre conventions and tosses some aside. Almost all fantasy, Abraham has observed, derives from J.R.R. Tolkien and the faux-medieval-European worlds he created. This effort is something different, even approaching science fiction in its imaginative geography, and with a strange sort of anthropology to boot—one of the first people we meet, for instance, is an exemplar of "the thirteen races of humanity" and she has fearsome tusks to match her gigantic fingers, a sort of Tolkienesque dwarf in reverse. This ain't your grandpa's Tolkien, either, to judge by some of the dialogue: "Who the fuck are you?" asks a sailor, to which Strider—beg pardon, Marcus, his figurative cousin—replies, "The man telling you that's enough." It's as if Clint Eastwood went to Narnia, which, come to think of it, isn't a bad Hollywood pitch. But the setup isn't quite as macho as all that, for in the gathering storm of Forces of Evil versus good guys, it's a young girl, Cithrin the half-Cinnae, who's entrusted with the secrets of the bank—and we're not talking just any old double-entry bookkeeping either. But even the fattest wallet doesn't stand up to a double-edged broadsword, and there things get interesting. All the makings of a standard fantasy are there: an improbable band battles seemingly insurmountable odds to save humankind and restore someone's birthright, evil comes close to triumphing, the darkness descends and then... But Abraham avoids the excesses of formula, and if the back-and-forth is sometimes a little flat ("My Lord Issandrian forgets that this is not the first violence that your disagreements with House Kalliam have spawned"), the story moves along at a nice clip.

Will truth and justice prevail? Stay tuned. A pleasure for Abraham's legion of fans.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 15, 2011

Soldier-turned-mercenary Marcus wants no part of the war looming between the Free Cities and the Severed Throne, so he enlists a group of traveling players to act the part of guards in a caravan leaving a city in the danger zone. Cithrin, heir to a banking house, joins the caravan to move the bank's holdings to a safe place. They cross paths with Geder, a scholar-soldier whose interest in philosophy and disinterest in the ways of war mark him as expendable in the political and military game of nations. This complex and carefully orchestrated tale by the author of "The Long Price Quartet" (A Shadow in Summer; A Betrayal in Winter; An Autumn War; The Price of Spring) never takes the easy path of good versus evil; the characters embody both moral strengths and weaknesses, and this gives them depth and solid grounding in their world. VERDICT Readers who enjoy intricate plots and true-to-life characters will appreciate this fantasy series opener.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.