Fire & Ice
Ratings2
Average rating2.8
"Love the writing, characters and story." --Kevin Anderson, author of the Dune novels about the Icefire story on which this fantasy series is based. Deep under the City of Glass in the frozen southern land, an age-old machine called the Heart of the City radiates a power which locals call icefire. Most citizens are immune to it, but a few, always born with physical disabilities, can bend it to their will. For fifty years, the ruling Eagle Knights, who fly on the back of giant birds, have killed these Imperfects, fearing the return of the old royal family, who used icefire to cut out people's hearts, turning them into ghostly servitors. The old king's grandson Tandor only sees the good things icefire brought: power and technology now forgotten while the people of the south live in dire poverty. He's had enough of seeing his fellow kinsfolk slaughtered by ignorant Knights, of Imperfect babies being abandoned on the ice floes to be eaten by wild animals. His grandfather's diary tells him how to increase the beat of the Heart the first step to making the land glorious once more. Arrogant as he is, he sets the machine in motion. All he needs is an army of Imperfect servitors to control the resulting power. Isandor is Imperfect, an ex-Knight apprentice, betrayed by his best friend and running for his life. The queen Jevaithi is Imperfect, living like a prisoner amidst leering Knights, surviving only because the common people would rebel if their beloved queen were harmed. Both are young and desperate and should be grateful that Tandor wants to rescue them from their hopeless situations. Or so he thinks. The youngsters, however, have no inclination to become heartless ghosts, but while they defy Tandor, the Heart beats, and he alone cannot control its power. For people who like their fantasy dark and gritty. Think Joe Abercrombie, Karen Miller, Robin Hobb, George R.R. Martin. free, freebie, dark fantasy, steampunk, post-apocalyptic, magic, sorcery, epic fantasy, knights, eagles, bears, fantasy free books, fantasy series
Series
Featured Series
3 primary books#1 in Icefire Trilogy
Icefire Trilogy is a 3-book series with 3 released primary works first released in 2011 with contributions by Patty Jansen.
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This is a book with promise that doesn't quite deliver. The central concept (a font of special power, a revolution with a hazy past), while not entirely novel, is well conceived and offers some nice touches (antarctic location, a steampunk-ish approach to magic).
Unfortunately, the book reads as a not-quite finished draft. It starts in media res, and Jansen takes her time to give us enough clues to put the pieces in place. Some of that is deliberate (the murky background of the last regime change), but some is clearly not (who's who, and how they're related). I felt that it just didn't all hang together well, though, frustratingly, it could have, with a little more work.
I like that the key characters weren't simple black and white, though some of the supporting cast were, and others were simple stereotypes. There were some reveals that I felt were unnecessary, and made the story a little mawkish, or at least brought it below the level it could otherwise have reached.
Mostly, the story and world simply wasn't as well realized or described as I would have hoped. A solid beta draft, rather than a finished product. It's for that reason that, though I'm intrigued by the story, I probably won't go on to volumes 2, 3, or .5.
* A note on typos, which seem to feature unusually heavily in the comments, and even led Ms. Jansen to include a note defending Australian norms: Aside from use of single quotes instead of double, I didn't notice or care about the Astralianisms. (There were some cases of inconsistent voice, but that's nothing to do with the variety of English.) I did note a moderate number of typos that I would have expected to be corrected by now (I got my copy recently from Amazon). I'm pretty sure that missing punctuation, misspelling of the heroine's name, mistaken words (‘had' for ‘and') also have nothing to do with Australian English. But we're talking about 11 instances in a 250 page book (I mark them to edit out later) - noticeable, but not too worrying. I know how hard typos can be to spot, so the concern is not that there were some, but that there still are.
