Summerbook #19: The Anvil of the World

By -

 The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker

 

#20booksofsummer note: I guess I'm a day late and a dollar short, but no worries.  I finished this on September 1, and The Golden Bough is book #20, so I'm calling it good!

I have really loved Kage Baker's Company series, and this was her first dive into fantasy instead of SF.  (Do you know, she only published for about 13 years before she died too young in 2010?  She produced an incredible number of books in that time!)

Smith just wants a quiet life and a steady job that doesn't involve killing people -- which is his major talent.  He takes a job leading a caravan from the breadbasket city of Troon to the sea port Salish, carrying lots of cargo, several odd passengers, and a good crew.  After the caravan is attacked three times, Smith figures something might be up with these passengers...

The world has several species: Smith is of the Children of the Sun, a prolific people given to building, blood feuds, and a total lack of thought for the environment.  Then there are the pacifist, forest-dwelling Yendri, and the two races don't get along that well.  Also there are demons!  

Baker packs a stunning amount of plot into a 350-page story.  I thought we were setting up for a trilogy, but she gets a trilogy-worth into one volume.  There are other stories set on the same world, though, so I'd like to get hold of The House of the Stag next, which features the history of the Yendri.

This novel is quite a lot of fun.  It doesn't take itself very seriously -- though there are some heavy moments too -- and it was a nice relaxing read, great for a summer escape from all the mess that is the world right now.

Comments

  1. LorySeptember 6, 2020 at 5:04 AM

    Wow, no I did not know Baker's publishing time was that short. Sad. But we have the books to comfort us.

    This is one of those ones I can't remember whether I read it or not. I guess I'd have to get ahold of it again to be sure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jenny @ Reading the EndSeptember 7, 2020 at 8:24 AM

    Holy crow, I knew that Kage Baker had died young, but I didn't realize at ALL that she had written all those books in only thirteen years. I have The Anvil of the World, but I haven't read any Kage Baker books since finishing the Company series -- I keep thinking I want to save them for a rainy day, given that there won't ever be any new ones. :(

    ReplyDelete
  3. JeanSeptember 7, 2020 at 9:50 AM

    Lory, if you'd read it you would probably remember, I think. At least, I thought it was pretty memorable...

    Jenny, I know what you mean. I think I've had Anvil on the shelf for a couple of years at least.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the source of the s
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th
Read more