At the whims of Gods and Men…Isaura has emerged from the spirit realm forever altered. No longer a pariah, she embraces the future offered in Altaica, but learns that her survival has come at a price. Her transformation is the perfect weapon for Elena to use against her.The mysterious Asena and the Lady vie for Isaura. Caught between two ancient powers, Isaura must try to make her own path. … Master spy Vikram launches a counterinsurgency against Ratilal and Faros, weaving innocents into the plot to bring him down. Ratilal prepares to wage war against Karan and Baldev. Desperately, he seeks clandestine means to wreak revenge on them in the very heart of their territory, with devastating results.With enemies nearing, Isaura must learn to master her powers. Aid arrives from the most unlikely source–one who knows no rules and respects no one.Having run from one war she will not run from another…The battle is joined.
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The Chronicles of Altaica make for a great read, the kind that you keep reading as you stumble off the bus and still read right up until you arrive (sigh) at the door of the day job. Adventure and danger, hard rides and mountain crossings, spies and plots and murders, primal magic and goddesses, war and strategy, skirmishes and battles and desperate duels. Here is a whole world of rivalries, peoples, cultures and absorbing characters.
In the first part of The Chronicles of Altaica, the villagers fled an invading army, got swept out to sea and then were rescued by people in another country that they knew nothing of. My difficulty now is to urge you to read this sequel, Asena Blessed, without blurting out ‘spoilers’. I will highlight some aspects of the world building and the characters that I particularly liked.
Animal guardians have become a feature in fantasy tales since their appearance in Phillip Pullman’s books. We readers may have grown used to these linked animals existing mainly for the sake of the humans, like enhanced pets. Tracy Joyce turns that idea on its head by considering the wild nature of the linked animal. What if the linked animal has its its own intentions? What if it could be too powerful and difficult to control? Some scenes in Asena Blessed took me by surprise because the guardian acted on its own account, and the result was not remotely cutesy.
Complicated heroes. Throughout the first book the reader identifies with the dilemmas of the central character, Isaura. In Asena Blessed, however, she is swept unwillingly into the spirit realm and emerges more conflicted than ever. Her resulting actions are not necessarily noble at all times. I often blinked at the turn of events. ‘Did she really do that?’
Matriarchs and Female Warriors. To say this book includes ‘strong female characters’ is an understatement. Among the Altaicans, all adults train for fighting and the tattooed and hardened women ride with the men. Key movers in this story include the female keepers of lore known as ‘Kenati’, the matriarch of the wolf-like Asena clan , the Lady Malak, who strives to undermine the power of the tyrant Ratilal, and an intervening female spirit who may or may not be a goddess but who in any case seems to be playing her own game.
Plausible Warfare: We have all endured movies and novels in which the fighting scenes are over the top: every warrior seems to know all the modern martial arts. Bows fire multiple arrows at a time, arrows and sword blades cut like lasers through the heaviest body armour, and so on until it all gets silly. Not so here. The tactics, weapons, armour, siegecraft and melees are based on the author’s research of warfare in our own non-Altaica world. The fighting here is brutal, the wounds nasty, and soldiers do appalling things to civilians. This is a fantasy world but it is no fairy tale.
Publisher: Odyssey Books, Canberra
Epic fantasy book 2 of a series and before you start, book 3 isn’t due out until 2017. If you’re reading this review and it is 2017; perfect! You won’t have long to wait. If you’re in 2018, even better, no wait at all. You may as well buy book 3 at the same time as no. 2 because waiting is terrible! You are not going to want to wait.
I’m starting with the end in this review. I approached the last few chapters of Asena Blessed with trepidation. You know the feeling when you just don’t want the story to end? As the number of pages left to read dwindled at an increasingly rapid rate, I realised that the end was way too close. But I couldn’t stop reading or even slow down. I had to know what happened.
Tracy is such a great writer. If you love epic fantasy, you are going to love the Chronicles of Altaica of which Asena Blessed is the second in the series. The characters and the journeys they take in life are well thought out and the actions scenes are fabulous!
To get back to the beginning: Asena Blessed carries on from Altaica (book one) with the story of Isaura. Isaura has grown up as the outsider in her close knit village. Different colour skin, different background, and family from a different part of the world all together. She has a small group of friends who protect and are wary of her at the same time. When war comes to the village (as inevitably it must, this is epic fantasy after all), the villagers including Isaura and friends must flee. In so doing, they all become refugees in a strange land. Asena Blessed takes up their story of rescue and forced assimilation and the rising of Isaura from isolated outsider to someone who finds power. She is the Asena Blessed.
This is the part where I want to gush about what happens, Isaura nearly dies, is brought back, discovers she has new power, can talk to wolves…. But I really don’t want to give it all away.
Needless to say, Tracy has produced a story with plenty of action and enough detail for readers to be swept into a whole new world. The characters have plenty of flaws (perfect characters are so boring), the descriptions are spot on (no exposition), and the fight scenes are excellently choreographed.
I can well imagine cosplayers outfitting themselves as Isaura or Karan or Beldev or Asha and striding around a con in full battle gear.
If you’re of analytic frame of mind, you’ll probably be interested in how Tracy handles issues of racism, gender relations, sexism, bullying, and grief. It’s all there and really shows this as a modern story pushing through barriers. If you’ve picked up the book and just want to jump right in to a rollicking read, you have exactly the right book in your hands.
Gritty, action-packed. Has a really fun/nasty mule in it and an eagle with a severed head. It’s kind of like Tamora Pierce for grownups.