Liviu's Reviews > Midwinter

Excellent debut though not your usual epic fantasy since it features, magic, floating cities, long-lived elves, secondary-world as well as modern cars, shotguns, 21st century humans, and it's not of the the sick/nerd/outcast human magically transported to be "Sir Hero and save the world" variety either.

The one human major character is still secondary to the main heroes and more of an accidental observer than anything else.

Midwinter has also quite a sf-nal feel, its Seelie and Unseelie countries feeling more like typical humanoid alien places from a sf Planetary Adventure, than a fantasy realm accessed by inter-dimensional rifts as is the case.

There are lots of subtle clues scattered through the novel and it's easy to miss them and be confused by the familiar seeming, but always confounding expectations setting of the novel, though the action and main characters are straightforward.

Mauritane is the commoner hero, married into but never fully accepted by the nobility, loyal, courageous, raising on military merit to important positions and brought down by dastardly noble subordinates on faked evidence, now offered a chance to redeem himself by undertaking an "against all odds" mission, Raieve the tough warrior girl, unjustly imprisoned because she killed the noble who tried to rape her and having a crush on the married Mauritane, Silverdun the noble born hedonist, imprisoned for his fortune by cunning relatives who discovers there is more to life than immediate sensual pleasure, and the 21st century human physicist Slattery on a rescue mission in the Seelie lands gone wrong.

All are imprisoned for life in an impregnable fortress when they are offered a seemingly impossible task in exchange for pardon and on their journey we encounter peril, heart-break, sense of wonder, superb action and derring-do.

Midwinter is a page turner and a very exciting novel which managed to surprise me with unexpected twists and turns despite its seemingly straightforward plot.

Sometimes the unexpected elements thrown into the mix - and there are quite a few, but I do not want to spoil some big surprises - do not seem to quite fit with the world-building that has gone before, but that's just our expectations of a traditional epic fantasy confounded once more, and the novel hangs together very well in my opinion.

As some minor niggles, the main villain is a comic-opera one to a large extent, while the name of our hero Mauritane is sounding like a Countess' name at the Sun King's Versailles Court than a tough, hardened warrior, and that incongruity stayed with me to the end of the novel detracting from its enjoyment. I liked though some of the other names, the two immortal Queens, Titania of the Seelie lands, Mab of the Unseelie ones, the Arcadian religions, names of places. Overall the mixture of strange and familiar in the naming conventions works well with the notable exception above.

Overall though Midwinter is the best pure genre debut of 09 so far for me and highly recommended.