Ilario: the Lion's Eye by Mary Gentle
reviewed by David Soyka
The story is narrated by the newly freed, but shortly re-enslaved, Ilario. Ilario had been raised by foster parents
who gave him into slavery to serve as King Rodrigo's court freak; eventually his real mother who gave him
up, now wife to the king's chief counselor, Videric, acknowledges him. She also tries to kill him. Several times.
Ilario: the Lion's Eye by Mary Gentle
reviewed by Alma A. Hromic
Although a stand-alone novel, this is billed as a prequel, a book
in the universe of Ash: The Secret History, set fifty years before. It's a stab at fleshing out and explaining
the weird universe that Ash and her cohorts live in. But that's just part of it. For it
takes a special character to be able to carry a storyline -- in first person -- for the duration of a novel this long
and complex, but that's exactly what Ilario does.
Cartomancy by Mary Gentle
reviewed by David Soyka
The title story for this collection provides a framing device to connect otherwise unconnected tales. Perhaps its the most
famous use is Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man where which various disparate tales are "told" on the moving tattoos
of a man's flesh. Here, "Cartomancy" concerns a voluptuous, scantily leather clad halfling and her ugly orc companion who tempt the newly
elected Pontiff of blue-skinned elves with a marvelous map that, with a drop of blood, depicts whatever is going on in that
part of the world.
1610: A Sundial in a Grave by Mary Gentle
reviewed by David Soyka
Valentin Raoul Rochefort is a French spymaster and assassin loyal to a fault to the Duc de Sully, the French prime minister for
King Henri the Fourth. Henri's wife, Queen Marie de Medici, manipulates this loyalty to blackmail Rochefort to arrange the
assassination of her husband and gain France's throne for herself. Rochefort's seemingly goes along with the Queen while planning
to protect both his patron and his king, but good intentions backfire and regicide results nonetheless. Knowing his capture would
implicate the Duc, Rochefort flees to England in search of both sanctuary and political connections to help reveal and revenge
the Queen's treachery without imperiling the Duc. Instead, Rochefort is recruited in a plot to assassinate the British King James.
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White Crow by Mary Gentle
reviewed by David Soyka
This is a compendium of three loosely interlinked novels (Rats and Gargoyles, Left to His Own Devices,
and The Architecture of Desire), as well as three short stories ("Beggars in Satin," "The Knot Garden," and
"Black Motley"). They feature, for the most part, expert swordswoman and magical healer Valentine along with her lover/husband,
Lord-Architect Baltazar Casaubon. Their adventures take place in multiple universes -- a Renaissance-like steampunk realm in which
humans subservient to a race of anthropomorphic rats are lorded over by a collective of thirty-six sphinx-like creatures, a
near-future cybertech England and an 18th century London torn in a civil war between female-led Puritan and Monarchist
factions -- sharing a framework in which magic works according to the principle of Hemeretic science, a 17th century heresy.
Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle
reviewed by Katharine Mills
Quite apart from the author's sly games with the stodginess of accepted scholarship,
this is also a wicked good adventure story. The author understands
both the movement of politics across nations, and the motivations of seemingly
insignificant people, and she makes her reader feel both. Her battles are as
simultaneously glorious and horribly sordid as real battles must have been;
she spares no gruesomeness in her description, yet the breathless
exhilaration of the fighter is there as well.
A Secret History and Carthage Ascendant by Mary Gentle
reviewed by Rich Horton
It begins as a seemingly "normal" historical fiction, with a very realistic
and believable portrayal of Ash's childhood as a 15th-century mercenary camp
follower, then jumping to her role as the Captain of some 800 mercenaries at
the age of 19 or 20. Then the reader begins to notice little details, such
as the voices Ash hears, or the references to a different-seeming variety of
Christianity, or the odd mention of Carthage and the Eternal Twilight.
Somehow Carthage has survived until the 1470s, and, more strangely, the Sun
never shines over that ancient city. Before long, there is an encounter with
robots (Stone Golems) used as weapons of war, unusual speculation about
parallel worlds, long-term breeding projects, and other decidedly
fantastical devices.
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