Defeating the fly-by-night monsters in Barbara Hambly's first Darwath trilogy turns out to have been the easy part, as we saw in 1996's Mother of Winter and her latest, Icefalcon's Quest, a page-turner that kept me reading late into the night to finish it. The Dark, the antagonists in the first set of books, are far less evil and vicious than the human villains Hambly pits her characters against this time out. Instead of the familiar voices of Rudy and Gil, the Southern Californians who tell the earlier stories, in Quest the enigmatic northern barbarian Icefalcon takes center stage, allowing readers to finally learn why he left his isolated homeland and to understand the forces driving him. The shift to a far colder climate that woke the Dark in the first books continues to squeeze the remaining outposts of civilization. With food scarce, bandit bands terrorize ever-larger swaths of countryside. The lucky inhabitants of the Keep of Dare, thanks to hydroponics and other resources rediscovered from earlier times, have enough to get by, but that only makes them a bigger target for the desperate, including two old enemies who join forces to kidnap the young Prince Tir and besiege the Keep. Icefalcon tracks them north, into the homeland he fled at 17, and finds three allies among his relatives and sworn enemies. Home isn't what he remembers, between the encroaching ice and his time in the soft southern lands. And while watching and waiting for a chance to rescue Tir from his captors, he also discovers cause to stay in the north and repay an old rival. Hambly doesn't pull any punches in Quest. Her villains are Evil with a capital E, and some scenes are disturbing in the amount of suffering the seven-year-old Tir -- and others -- endure. But as in all her best books, villains get their due in satisfying but surprising ways, the plot offers plenty of revelations, and we come away with new insights about favorite characters and the world they inhabit. |
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Read a sample chapter of Icefalcon's Quest on the Del Rey website.
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| About the Reviewer
Renee Stern warns parents of small children that an early and steady diet of sf/f made her the person she is today.
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Icefalcon's Quest