Thursday, July 22, 2010

Lord of the Changing Winds (book review)

Book review from The Movie Snob

Lord of the Changing Winds, by Rachel Neumeier (Orbit 2010). Full disclosure -- Ms. Neumeier is a cousin of mine, so I may be prone to partiality here. Disclaimer aside, I thought this was a really good fantasy novel. It's subtitled The Griffin Mage: Book One, but it reads like a stand-alone book. In a world where magic is real, three human kingdoms exist side by side: Linularinum, Feierabiand, and Casmantium. Kes is a teenaged girl in a small village in Feierabiand, where nothing much ever happens--until a band of griffins (half-eagle, half-lion, all-killer) swoops out of the sky and begins to change the lush and fertile fields of Feierabiand into the scorched and lifeless desert they prefer. What is the cause of this unwelcome invasion? The mystery only deepens when a wizard appears and sweeps Kes away to the griffins' new home. I thought this was a good story, well told, and even better than Neumeier's debut novel The City in the Lake. One quibble -- did the griffins' names really need to be such jawbreakers? Try saying "Opailikiita Sehanaka Kiistaike" three times fast! And that's just one griffin! Quibble aside, I highly recommend Lord of the Changing Wind and look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

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