YA Fantasy Review: 'Hunting' by Andrea K Höst

Now here’s a thing: a book by Andrea K Höst that doesn’t set me on fire. It’s a perfectly fine, entertaining read, you understand, a solid YA fantasy with a little romance, but it just doesn’t quite have that extra something that normally lifts the author’s writing out of the ‘good’ column and into the ‘awesome’. That makes me sad.

It starts badly. The first few chapters are a blizzard of names and titles and nicknames and throwaway references to customs and ideas that the average reader can’t possibly understand. And is that an orphaned heroine of mysterious background I see before me? (Well, not quite but close enough.) And - surely not? - that can’t be a girl masquerading as a boy? But it is. Can we say ‘overused tropes’ here? Naturally the author is far too creative not to put her own twist on all this, but it’s still a slightly underwhelming start.

The magic of this world is quite intriguing. The rulers are chosen by the gods, rather than simply inheriting their power, and the gods give them a direct connection with their land. Their job is to maintain the balance of the land, so that it’s not overused or neglected, and they have powers to enable them to do that. The gods also intervene at death, choosing whether a soul is worthy to go to the sun god (a heaven equivalent), or goes to a different god to be cleaned up first. A very few are rejected outright, if they’ve been very evil, or are reborn, if they have some task to finish.

The plot involves someone going round bumping off herbalists. The heroine, Ash, the one pretending to be a boy, is a friend of one of those murdered, and is taken up by outsider Thornaster to help him investigate the murders, since she has some knowledge of herbs. So there’s a lot of sneaking around, and improbable mingling with the nobility, and dramatic rescues of various characters from attempted murders and the like. And it’s all great fun and a nice, easy read, so long as you switch off all logical thought.

The whole girl pretending to be a boy thing is the biggest obstacle for me. Is it really possible to do this convincingly? The author has considered some of the difficulties, like breasts and periods and ways of walking, but I always wonder quite how you’d get away with not being able to pee standing up. And here Ash is mingling with an entirely masculine crowd, yet nobody wonders why she always sneaks away to pee?

But if you can get past that, the story rolls along very nicely, in the usual crisis-resolution, crisis-resolution way, and I suppose the final explanations and tidying up of loose ends made some sense. It just all seemed a bit less surprising and a bit more ordinary than I’d anticipated. The romance, such as it was, started too easily and resolved itself without very many difficulties. There were some nice moments along the way, though, and I rattled through this at a fair pace, without ever losing interest. This is, by any standards, an enjoyable read. It’s only by comparison with some of the author’s other work that it falls a little short. Three stars.

Sci-Fi Review: 'Caszandra' by Andrea K Höst

This is the third part of the Touchstone trilogy, and anyone who, like me, loved the first two, won’t have any problem enjoying this too. I’ve classified these as sci-fi (other planets, high-tech everywhere) but I’m getting less sure, since the technology is delightfully arm-wavy. All communication is via the ‘interface’, a brain-embedded universal internet which is incredibly useful at crucial moments. It can send/receive messages, provide all sorts of background information (aka instant info-dump) at the drop of a hat, and helpfully records everything so that the detail can be picked up later. There are ‘drones’ (robot things) which are deployed in a variety of plot-facilitating ways. Then there’s the literal world-building - when a new building is required, a bucket of special goop is ‘programmed’ with an architectural plan and away it goes. It beats scaffolding and uncouth building workers, anyway. Even the ‘ships’ used for inter-planetary travel are largely undescribed and unexplained. Then there are ‘psychics’ with all sorts of powers - elemental, levitation and teleportation, as well as actual psychic (mind-reading, sort of) abilities - all of which seems suspiciously fantasy. No quest, no secret heir to the kingdom, and definitely no magic swords, but there is a heroine with mysterious unexplained powers. There are monsters and at least one traditional fantasy beast, too.

Whatever you call it, the setup is much the same. Cass is still the stranger from Earth with the weird unexplained abilities which are so useful in unlocking the abandoned planet Muina, if they don’t get her killed her first. The inter-planetary politics and resettlement are taking centre stage now, but the psychic military, the Setari, are still back and forth on missions to fight monsters. And we finally have a Big Bad - the particularly creepy humanoid monsters who are both intelligent and organised. And hell-bent on destruction and mayhem, not to mention capturing Cass. So the race is on to find out what is going on, and a way to fight back.

The tension ramps up nicely to the grand confrontation, and much of the book has rather a heavy background tone. Cass and friends are doing various fluffy things (going shopping, eating out, socialising) while waiting for the Big Bad (the Cruzatch) to turn up again and kidnap Cass for various evil purposes, destroy the known world, kill all the nice friends and generally carry out their villainous plans. The good guys, meanwhile, are more or less floundering round trying to guess what awful thing might be coming up next, with no greater ambition than just - well, surviving. Their only plan seems to be - let’s blow stuff up and see if that helps. Or throw Cass at something to see what happens (which has been going on throughout, really).

This part of the book stretches the diary format to its absolute limits. It worked well earlier on, I think, to get the reader right under Cass’s skin, and was a very effective way of getting across her sense of isolation and differentness. It really doesn’t work so well for big battle scenes, because the reader knows immediately that Cass survived, or she wouldn’t be writing her diary afterwards. So the big confrontation is effectively told in abbreviated summary form (‘and then I... and then we...’), which loses a lot of the tension. There is also the problem that the romance has been settled, and while it's a lot of fun going through the are-they-no-surely-not phase with friends, it was actually more fun when they were kept apart and Cass secretly had the hots for him. Or at least, it was more tense. A large part of the atmosphere in the first two books revolved around the very strict military protocols wrapped around everything Cass did and the stiffly correct attitude of the Setari, which kept her so heart-rendingly alone. Now that she's sleeping with one of the Setari and is (largely) friends with the rest, things get a little warm and fuzzy and group-hug-y.

One aspect is unchanged, however; everything still hinges on Cass and her strange set of abilities as 'touchstone', the key to revealing the past, what went wrong to cause the planet Muina to be abandoned, and (indirectly) the present and future too. It's surprising how often these talents drive the plot by revealing key information or making some unfeasibly difficult task possible, but while this is very convenient, it never feels like deus ex machina, since Cass has had these abilities from the start and has simply learned to use them (or to use them better, perhaps). Plus they frequently go wrong or out of control or twist off in unexpected ways. The author is very good at following the appropriate logic for these developments, so that when Cass has one of her frequent brushes with death, she is 'grounded' for a while afterwards, even when it might have been more dramatic to have her present at some incident or other, instead of hearing about it second hand. Nice, too, to see Cass herself using her talents directly to fight her own battles (sometimes literally), instead of being a passive tool to be manipulated. The moment when, in the midst of mayhem, she decides to visualise into reality a battle-winning device of awesome proportions is simply epic.

This is the final part of the trilogy, and I hugely enjoyed the first two parts, so it’s not exactly a big surprise that I loved this one too. Of course, it’s not perfect (what is?). The problem with keeping track of the vast array of characters is even greater this time round, and apart from the Big Bad they all seem to be rather nice, pleasant people. Even the few set up as hostile turn out to be gruff and suspicious rather than outright nasty, in the end. And who'd have thought so many of them would be breath-takingly beautiful, intelligent people? From being entirely alone on a strange planet, Cass ends up friends with pretty much everyone, which is slightly implausible. The complexities of a society of umpteen million people are fairly comprehensively airbrushed away into one homogenous mass (although I guess the ubiquitous interface would eliminate a lot of differences). The rather different society on Nuri was interesting, and I would have liked to know more about it. I also found it strange that so much of life on Tare and Muina was similar to Earth; there was really no effort to make these worlds truly alien, apart from a few minor details tossed in here and there. And anyone looking for explanations for every little mystery will be disappointed, since much remained unanswered or vague.

In the end, though, none of that mattered. I loved Cass's shift over the course of the trilogy from schoolgirl thinking only about romance and exams, to the saviour of worlds and the focus of inter-planetary law-making. And she makes the transition without fuss - the occasional totally justified hissy-fit excepted - and without losing her essential nature or her sense of humour. Much of what she goes through is pretty horrible but she bears it with quiet fortitude and oodles of common sense. One of my favourite fictional characters. Five stars.

Sci-Fi Review: 'Lab Rat One' by Andrea K Höst

I loved ‘Stray’, the first part of the Touchstone trilogy, so I moved straight onto part two. And wouldn’t you just know it, the one time I don’t need a ‘Previously on...’ type recap because it’s all fresh in my mind, there one is at the front of the book. And again there’s a glossary and list of characters at the back. If only all authors were so considerate. The previous book had no cliffhanger ending, but there wasn’t much resolution, either - just an acceptance by main character Cass that, having stepped accidentally through some kind of wormhole-type ‘gate’ from Earth and finding herself on a different planet altogether, there’s not going to be a happy ever after any time soon, and doing her bit to help out the locals with their problems in the meantime is not such a bad thing. So at first, the story continues in much the same way, with Cass being carted about on missions, tested and trained, and treated very much like the lab rat she designated herself early on. So for anyone who disliked that aspect of the first book, this is more of the same.

Fortunately, we haven’t yet seen the full extent of Cass’s unique set of abilities, so even a routine test can suddenly turn into a frantic scramble for survival or an ooh-aah moment. The opening up of the abandoned planet of Muina through Cass’s talents is fascinating. We also see more in this book of the other societies descended from the abandoned planet of Muina (where Cass first arrived), so there is a certain amount of inter-planetary posturing going on, which is quite fun. And Cass becomes a media star! But much of the action centres around the Setari (psychic ninja space soldiers, basically), who are defending Tare, their home planet, from the creepy and highly variable Ionoth which leak through from - well, wherever they come from (I’m hazy about the ‘spaces’ and ‘pillars’ and whatever it was that happened). In book one, the Setari mostly treated Cass as a piece of military equipment, useful but not particularly interesting, and she had to fight to get them to see her as anything other than an object. This time round, they are much more aware of her as a person, and she is beginning to build relationships with some of them, and assert herself as a person.

Partly this is because she can speak the language better, so she is able to express herself with more subtlety, and display her wonderful sense of humour. I very much like the way the author has handled the language differences, so that Cass gradually becomes more fluent over the course of the books, although lapsing sometimes when under stress. I have no idea whether the early efforts are an accurate simulation of how a native English speaker would adapt to a new language, but it seemed pretty convincing to me. I found it totally believable that the Tarens would not appreciate how intelligent she is, when her only communications are halting baby sentences with bad grammar.

I like Cass very much. She’s exactly the sort of person I would love to have for a friend - smart, self-deprecating, sensible and very, very funny (in a totally non-vicious way). Her observations of Taren life and the people around her are wonderful. And I have to confess to having the hots for Ruuel (the love interest), which is so not me. My taste in men was formed by Woody Allen (cute and funny) or Robert Redford (roguish in a dishevelled but handsome way), and perfectly honed, impossibly fit and laconic-bordering-on-terse types don’t do much for me. But Ruuel? Mmmm, yes. There’s a certain amount of angsting going on Cass’s head about him, but it’s very funny. She rates men on the Orlando Bloom-meter, and when one of the Setari registers a 7, she points out that Orlando Bloom himself registers a 7 on the Ruuel-meter. Did I mention how much I love Cass’s sense of humour? And for anyone concerned about the romance level, it's certainly higher than in the first book, but there’s still a lot more plot than angst.

This book is pure undiluted pleasure. I was slightly drunk on the enjoyment of it, and hey - no calories, no falling over and no hangover afterwards. Just a great big smile. Why isn’t every book like this? Twelve stars. At least. And now straight on to the third book...

Sci-Fi YA Review: 'Stray' by Andrea K Höst

I loved this book, loved, loved, loved it. It’s the first book in ages to keep me up until the wee small hours because I absolutely positively had to know what was coming next. Here’s the premise: almost-eighteen year old Cass is walking home from her suburban school one day after her last exam before graduation when - pop! - she finds herself in the middle of a not-Earth forest, with no way back. For a while, she is on her own, walking through this world with its odd mixture of Earth-like creatures (deer and otters) and other more alien types, surviving as best she can. She’s a pretty resourceful type, but even so it’s a marginal business. But luckily some super-ninja soldier types from a technologically advanced society turn up and rescue her, and after that things get seriously weird.

Cass is an unusual sort of heroine. She’s clearly intelligent, but she’s not the kick-ass type of female so beloved of the current sci-fi and fantasy scene. She seems quite passive, going along with everything that’s asked of her, even though she’s basically being used as a military tool, but then her new ‘friends’ don’t abuse or hurt her (at least, not intentionally!) and, frankly, I’m not at all sure what other options are open to her. Being useful and helpful (at least until you know your way round and have got a better grasp of the language) is just plain common sense. I loved the way that Cass gradually brought her hosts to see her as a person, with needs and feelings of her own, and not just a passive piece of kit (‘Military equipment doesn't salute’ she comments drily at one point).

The book is written in the first person in the form of a diary, which works very well to tell us what’s going on in Cass’s head. It also brilliantly conveys the sense of disorientation she frequently feels, and the ‘otherness’ of an Australian girl parachuted into a culture which has many similarities with Earth but is also scarily alien. Fortunately Cass has a great sense of humour, and sees the funny side of many of the peculiar situations she finds herself in. This is one of the great perks of portal-type stories, that the transported character can toss around all sorts of slang and in-jokes and cultural references: (‘I tried very unsuccessfully to explain Clint Eastwood, and then moved on to Johnny Depp, and now all of First Squad except Maze have sworn to find a path to Earth so they can watch Pirates of the Caribbean’).

As a piece of science fiction, this is fairly light on the sciencey bits. There’s nanotechnology, and a universal interface system (brain-embedded internet, basically), but the Ena (‘A dimension connected to the thoughts, memories, dreams and imagination of living beings’, it says in the glossary) which surrounds Cass’s new home, the monsters (Ionoths) living there and the psychic abilities of the Setari (the ninja soldiers) seem closer to fantasy to me. As with all the author’s work, there are plenty of deeper themes for those who like to look beneath the surface: about being an outsider, being treated with respect, duty versus freedom, the greater good versus the individual. Not to mention the pleasures and perils of a permanently wired-in internet.

This is another terrific piece of writing by one of my favourite authors. I was a little concerned about it being a YA book, but no need - there’s no love triangle, and the very small amount of angsting over boys is actually very funny. The only (minor) grumble I had was the sheer number of characters involved, a situation not helped by Cass’s early problems with the language, so that she spells names wrongly in the early parts of the book. But there’s a full list of characters at the back, plus a very useful glossary, which rather wonderfully explains all Cass’s Australia-speak and geekisms alongside the in-book terminology. This is very much the first book of the trilogy, so although there’s a mini-resolution, this doesn’t have the feel of a stand-alone book. Be prepared to invest in the whole trilogy (available as an omnibus), not to mention the fourth part, entitled ‘Gratuitous Epilogue’. Five stars.

Fantasy Review: 'And All The Stars' by Andrea K Höst

I don't read many young adult books, but I do read everything by Andrea K Höst, so this was a must for me. It's the author's first venture into post-apocalypse fantasy, and it begins, literally, after the apocalypse - the very instant after, as main character Madeleine finds herself amidst rubble from a disintegrated underground station. Rubble and dust, in fact, vast amounts of dust which coat everything, including Madeleine herself. And as she makes her escape through the ruined station, she encounters the base of the Spire, a black spike, which has instantaneously risen into the Sydney skyline, along with numerous others all around the world.

The early chapters of the book show a world divided in two - those who, like our heroine, have been exposed to the strange dust and begin to develop patches of colour on their bodies and unusual powers, and those who have not yet been contaminated. People know by instinct that the dust is something to avoid. One of the iconic moments of the book for me is the vivid image of Madeleine emerging from the train tunnel and climbing onto the platform of the next station down to escape, coated from head to foot in the mysterious dust, while passengers on a stopped train, staying safely enclosed beyond reach of the dust, peer through the windows at her in horrified pity.

As with all books of this type, survival is the first priority, and this part of the book is fairly conventional. Madeleine meets other survivors of the contamination, they begin to organise themselves, and use their ingenuity to avoid being hunted down. Naturally, there are constant threats and near-misses, but the gang is smart, and finds some pretty imaginative ways to hide and to provision themselves. Some of this is predictable and some is very ingenious, but although the plot burbles along quite nicely, it all felt slightly ho-hum. I think this is probably because it's YA, and quite an extreme YA book at that. All the main characters were teenagers, without a single older person (bar one in his twenties, later on), and the hide and survive plot made it seem almost like an Enid Blyton adventure - the Famous Five, only with romantic angst and a bit of sex thrown in. Although the characters were all interesting enough in their way, the uniformity of age made it a little flat for me.

But then, just past the two thirds point, there's a moment which changes everything, one of those magical OMG moments when your perception simply shifts sideways to open up the story in innumerable different ways. I love it when an author manages to do that to me. The ending is less magical and more prosaic, but still an enjoyable page-turner, and the epilogue - well, I'm never keen on epilogues, but that's just me. I can see the need for it here, however.

I was worried at one point that this was going to be a disappointment to me, but in the end the strong opening and that wonderful twist saved the day, and left me mulling over all the implications. I never fully engaged with the characters or the romantic entanglements early on, but eventually there was a great deal of depth to the story, and some of the issues raised buzzed round in my head for days. I liked, too, that the characters weren't the standard issue beautiful people who leaped into perfectly honed action when called upon. These were relatively ordinary people with odd combinations of talent and weakness. Problems were solved by intelligence, common sense and teamwork, rather than brute force. Nor was everyone uniformly heterosexual. An interesting and thought-provoking, if slightly uneven, effort. Four stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Stained Glass Monsters' by Andrea K Höst

This one starts with a bang, as a mysterious woman in white appears out of nowhere, seemingly, into the middle of a peaceful village. She stays exactly where she is for the rest of the book, but the story races about all over the Kingdom of Tyrland as the former Queen, now exiled into Eferum, the ‘other’ world, tries to make good her return.

There are two main characters, of whom Rennyn is the more interesting by far. Intelligent, competent and entirely self-sufficient, yet she never becomes a Mary Sue, and it’s always clear that she has hidden depths, as well as (perhaps) an agenda of her own. She’s accused of being arrogant, but perhaps it’s more a question of self-awareness. It’s not arrogance to know what has to be done and to go about doing it with minimal fuss. Kendall is the bratty not-quite-child, whose major role seems to be to ask the tricky questions so that essential elements of the magic system or necessary plot points can be explained to the reader, or to act as a window to events not seen by Rennyn. Despite her heroics at the big confrontation, she always felt a bit extraneous. I rather liked Rennyn’s younger brother, Seb, however, who has a very focused view of magic and simply refuses to acknowledge the validity of any viewpoint other than his own. He will ring a bell with anyone with knowledge of a certain geeky type of teenage boy.

The Kellian are the most intriguing aspect of the book. The stained glass monsters of the title, because of their ability to reflect or absorb (not quite clear which) the colours around them, they are magically created beings (golems, originally) who have subsequently interbred with humans, with interesting and very creepy results. Given that they give the book its title, it was always obvious that their role would be pivotal to events. Even so, I wasn’t expecting the way things turned out; as always, the author has the power to astonish and disturb in equal measure.

I’m a big fan of the author, who creates believable worlds where women are just - well, people, everything from Queens to mages to soldiers to farmers and everything in between. In addition, her worlds are always very different from the standard fantasy tropes and themes, so that just when you think you’ve got a handle on things the plot shoots off at a completely unexpected tangent. I love to be taken by surprise, especially when (as here) the surprise is totally logical and in line with everything that’s gone before. And as always, this is not just a retelling of the traditional good versus evil story. It’s not at all clear where, if anywhere, the distinction lies, and there are more shades of grey than black and white. There is also a more philosophical depth, for those who enjoy such things, about the rightness, or otherwise, of making decisions for other people, of controlling people with magic, of using people against their will.

If I have a complaint, it’s that the first half of the book is overfilled with exposition - details about the magic system, for instance, which is moderately complicated, or about the underlying politics, or about the plot itself. The Grand Summoning is a complicated process, and I got lost in the details sometimes. There were also too many characters for me to keep straight, and I wasn’t even clear, sometimes, which of them were human and which weren’t. Most of this, however, either resolved itself before the final confrontation or ceased to matter, and there was compensation in the array of very different locations where breaches from the Eferum occurred, necessitating some innovative solutions, both practical and magical.

The finale was appropriately epic, with innumerable twists and turns, the main plotline tied up with a very satisfactory little bow on top, yet with enough dangling threads to carry forward into book 2 of the series. This is a relatively short book with an interesting magic system, the fascinating non-human Kellians and some thought-provoking ideas. Apart from Rennyn and Seb, the humans are mostly walk-on parts, but they still feel like properly three-dimensional people. Another enjoyable read from Ms Höst. Four stars.

Fantasy Review: 'Champion of the Rose' by Andrea K Höst

Sometimes, when I feel as if I’m drowning in a sea of haven’t-I-read-this-before fantasy, the only antidote is some Andrea K Höst. Her work is original, intelligent and quirky, and reassures me that there are some authors out there who aren’t simply recycling the tired old tropes.

The premise here is that the country of Darest, ruled by the Rathen family, has been without a monarch for two hundred years. Being hedged about by unbreakable magic, however, which manifests as a rose bush, it continues to rumble along as if one will turn up any day, creating champions (guardians of the monarch) and protecting the royal palace. Until one day the rose bush produces a flower - an heir has appeared once more. The plot is largely about how the champion finds the heir and the ramifications of that, together with an intriguing mystery - why did all the heirs disappear anyway, and why has Darest been in decline for the past two hundred years?

The magic of the rose is one of the most intriguing aspects of the story. There isn’t anything terribly outlandish about the type of magic the author’s world can produce - there are spells created through spoken words or casting with the hands or carved runes, basically - but the way it is bound up through the rose, the champion, the Rathen heirs and the royal palace is fascinating. It’s also very creepy in the way it is actually a more-or-less physical part of the champion, giving her powers while also controlling her mind and body in very scary ways.

Soren, the champion, is an all-too-rare type of heroine - neither a warrior babe nor a princess nor a mage, just an ordinary woman chosen for no obvious reason for a job she feels spectacularly unsuited for, but which she nevertheless does to the very best of her ability. She doesn’t make stupid mistakes, she doesn’t turn into Wonder Woman, she doesn’t turn to jelly at the thought of a man, she’s just a normal woman using her common sense and intelligence. The romantic relationship resolves itself rather fast for my taste - I would have thought it would have taken longer to get over the traumatic early events - but it wasn’t a huge problem.

The two male main characters, Strake and Aristide, are much less ordinary, but then both have been part of the royal court from birth. They are both complicated and charismatic characters, and both have to suffer emotional shocks which they cope with in very different ways, but the way they inch towards a pragmatic working arrangement is very believable. The minor characters are well sketched out and perfectly believable, although I sometimes got confused about who was who. The Fae were particularly convincing, and the author beautifully captures the ‘other’-ness of them.

The created world is not especially unique, but that’s not a problem as most of the action takes place in and around the royal palace. Superfically the social structure is conventional: a ruling family, several other noble families, the usual array of soldiers, farmers, millers, innkeepers and so on. It’s nice to see that women are just as likely to be guards or monarchs or champions as men. The unique feature here is the prevalence of same sex marriage and also tribond marriages, which is thrown in as part of the background without much discussion or explanation. Much as I applaud this approach, I would have liked to know more about how it works.

The early part of the book feels both rushed and rather slow, if that isn’t too contradictory a description. It seems rushed because there is no background at all to Soren herself and not much about her role as champion before she’s tearing off to find the heir. And then the actual search for the heir feels a bit slow. But from then onwards, the pace picks up and becomes breathlessly fast, in that wonderful page-turningly riveting way. A lot of chores were neglected so that I could finish this as-fast-as-possible. The external threats - a magical killer on the loose and a possible assassin in the palace - plus the internal threat of the enchanted rose itself, which seems to have its own agenda, together with the political machinations of neighbouring countries and the tricky relationships between the champion and the monarch she has to protect, all of these combine to make a compelling story.

My only criticisms are the slightly bumpy start and a few confusing moments where it wasn’t quite clear to me what was happening. And I would have liked a map, too, but it wasn’t a big deal. [*] Overall, a refreshingly different story about believable, complicated people who behave in realistic ways, and revolving around a cleverly-devised enchantment which is almost a character in its own right. A good four stars.

[*] There's one on the author's website, here. Also some background to the story.

Review: 'Voice of the Lost' by Andrea K Host

This is the second part of the duology begun in 'The Silence of Medair'. It demonstrates the greatest strength of self-publishing, in that it allows the author the freedom to break away from the tired old tropes and traditions, and create something stunningly different. This is a wonderful, character-driven story with great depth.

The plot is too complicated to summarise briefly - suffice it to say that 'wild magic' has been let loose on the world, with strange and unpredictable consequences. This allows a number of dramatic twists - or rather, abrupt shifts of direction, which are in places hard to keep up with. I was repeatedly taken by surprise at these shifts, never seeing any of them coming, although they were all logical within the constructs of the story. Medair's capable self-reliance in the first book is no use in this wild-magic-driven world, and she becomes not much more than baggage for the skilled mages (adepts) at points, and dangerously close to the helpless female needing to be rescued. This is less disappointing than it might be, since the adepts are almost as helpless - even the most skilled are lost in the new world order, struggling to make the right decisions and find a way back to some kind of stability.

It has to be said that, although the events in the book are very dramatic, it's not really an action book. The main focus is Medair herself, her struggles with her own feelings and her constant rationalisations. There is a lot of angst here. Having failed in her original quest to defend her country against invasion, she has now accepted that the invaders are the establishment and has joined forces with them to defeat the new invaders, who are trying to restore the old order of five centuries ago. But naturally she feels all the guilt of her decisions, and this is where the book raises all the interesting questions: can you ever stop hating? where does hate end and love begin, and can you love and hate at the same time? when does an invading army become part of the invaded country? how do you live with your choices even when they were the best (or perhaps least worst) at the time? how do you know you made the right choice? can you make the right choice for the wrong reasons? And then there are the questions of race: are the small number of remaining 'pure blood' Ibisians less a part of their new home country than those of mixed blood? And is someone more (or less) Ibisian or Palladian because of the way they look? And the author cleverly addresses the issues without ever pulling out cultural or racial clichés. This is very elegantly done.

The characters themselves are well-drawn enough that we can understand and sympathise with their dilemmas. The focus in this book is almost entirely on Medair and Illukar, with the rest more in the background, but even so they all have their own problems to address - Ileaha in particular. I was disappointed that we saw so little of Avahn, however, since he was so easy to like, being more outgoing than most Ibisians. Fortunately Illukar opens up a lot in this book. I was a little surprised that some of the Decians became important characters here, since, although they were always important to the plot, the characters themselves seemed to be very much on the periphery in the first book (but on reflection, all the clues were there, I just wasn't paying attention - I was too focused on the Ibisians). And I was again delighted to see so many women in important roles - rulers, warriors, mages and not a whore in sight.

I have the same issues with the magic here as in the first book - it seems, at times, just too convenient, too powerful, and wild magic, in particular, seems to obey no real rules. This makes it possible for almost anything to happen at any moment, and the ending, as far as I could see, just came out of nowhere. I like magic to conform to some kind of system, so that when it's used you can see exactly how it might happen (so you say 'oh, of course' rather than 'wait, what?'). But on the other hand, it was a very fitting end for the story, totally appropriate for the characters, so it made complete sense in that way.

This is not a book for everyone. Those who prefer lots of action, big battle scenes and the like, will be disappointed at the introspective nature of the book. It's not that there is NO action, there is in fact plenty happening and very dramatic it is too, but it's mostly the salad garnish to the main dish of Medair reflecting on her decisions, her feelings and her guilt. I can't imagine what a mainstream publisher would do to a book like this, but personally I'm very glad that the author eventually managed to self-publish and put it out into the world as it was meant to be - quirky, original, intelligent and thought-provoking. I don't often give out five stars, and never before to a self-published work, but this deserves it.

Review: 'The Silence of Medair' by Andrea K Höst

For those who say all self-published works are dross - this book is a stunning counter example. The manuscript spent an unbelievable ten years - I'll say that again, TEN years! - languishing with a single publisher before the author withdrew it in disgust and self-published. You can see why they might have had a problem with it, because it's very different from the average. It's intelligent, thought-provoking and well written. It avoids cliches. It's character-driven fantasy at its best. It's al...moreFor those who say all self-published works are dross - this book is a stunning counter example. The manuscript spent an unbelievable ten years - I'll say that again, TEN years! - languishing with a single publisher before the author withdrew it in disgust and self-published. You can see why they might have had a problem with it, because it's very different from the average. It's intelligent, thought-provoking and well written. It avoids cliches. It's character-driven fantasy at its best. It's also a cracking story. I loved it.

The opening is, surely, how all fantasy novels should begin: not by parachuting the reader into the middle of a battle, or some gruesome moment intended purely to shock, but quietly, with the main character in her setting, then adding in the mysterious background, some magic and a threat, to draw you in. But then this is an unusual book in a number of different ways. Many of the events which other writers would turn into a whole trilogy - a massive magic-induced disaster, an empire threatened by invasion, an escalating, seemingly unwinnable, war, a desperate race to find a magic gizmo to turn the tide, and then, miraculously, actually finding said gizmo - all happened five hundred years in the past, and are revealed only briefly in passing. The author even resists the temptation to put them into a prologue. Instead, the story starts some months after the primary character, Medair, has returned with the gizmo, only to find that centuries have passed, the invaders have become the establishment and she herself is the outsider. Her sense of dislocation, and how she adjusts to the new regime, form the substance of the book.

The created world is not outrageously original, just the standard-issue pseudo-medieval arrangement, with a few little touches to make it different, and happily no hackneyed taverns, assassins, thieves, whores and the like, and no gratuitous violence or sex. So this is a relatively civilised and orderly world, where the complications are political rather than societal. And unlike many low-technology worlds, there's a relaxed gender-neutrality in operation. Women can, and do, become soldiers, heralds, mages, whatever they have an aptitude for. They can inherit empires, too. I get tired of the patriarchy thoughtlessly assumed in most fantasy.

And there's magic, of course. Oodles of magic. There are mages and adepts (which may be the same thing, I'm not clear about that) who have quite powerful abilities, and there are also magical artifacts. There is also 'wild magic', which is hugely, earth-shatteringly powerful (literally) and very unpredictable. I liked the way that magic can be sensed in some physical way, some kind of feeling that allows a character attuned to it to know that magic is being used, and sometimes what kind, and where, and how powerful it is. That was neat.

But it has to be said that sometimes the magic borders on being deus ex machina. The heroine gets into a tricky situation and has only to reach into her dimensionally flexible satchel and pull out some magic gizmo or other to effect her escape. Or else another character waves his or her hands around and - pow, she is magically constrained to do something or other. Is it really deus ex machina if we know ahead of time that the satchel contains magical gizmos, or that the character is a mage? Not sure, but it certainly made a very convenient plot device. On the other hand, it allowed the heroine to use her own self-reliance and not be dependent on a bloke turning up with a sword or a spell to rescue her. In fact, she was usually the one rescuing the blokes.

The heart of the book is the nature of the Ibisians, the invaders of five hundred years earlier, now the establishment. Medair's hatred and mistrust of them is still fresh, and the scenes between them crackle with tension, as she tries to adjust her strong and perhaps legitimate feelings to this new world order. The issue is complicated, too, by the other countries and factions still fighting against the new rulers. Where exactly do her loyalties lie? She has the magic gizmo which will destroy the invaders, but are these people still her enemies five centuries later? These themes - of loyalty and oppression and enforced compliance and the nature of colonialism - weave throughout the story.

This part of the book is beautifully done. The subtle and not so subtle differences between the world Medair remembers and the current one are neatly drawn - the architecture, clothing, food, mannerisms and customs - so that we first see the invaders through Medair's eyes as strangely alien beings, and only gradually begin to soften towards them as we get to know them better. It becomes apparent that five hundred years of assimilation has worked both ways, and these Ibisians are not the same as the enemy of Medair's own time.

The plot revolves around Medair's struggles with her own antipathies and growing respect for the Ibisians, so there is a great deal of introspection and (it has to be said) downright angsting going on. There were a few moments when I wished she would stop agonising and just get on with it. But fortunately there was enough action interspersed with the angst to keep things rattling along. There were a few places where I wasn't too sure what was going on, where a little more explanation or description would have helped. Occasionally the complex hierarchy of the Ibisians caught me out (all the ranks begin with a 'k', so they begin to blur together), and sometimes I wasn't even sure which character Medair was talking to. But these are minor issues, which never seriously affected my enjoyment. This is a great read, a story with an intriguing premise, unexpected twists and plenty of action. It's also that rare beast, a fantasy novel with a truly strong female lead character who's not remotely a stereotype. I recommend it. A good four stars.