July Books 19) The Mark of Ran
19) The Mark of Ran, by Paul Kearney
Paul was good enough to send me this after a brief encounter at P-Con earlier this year. I very much enjoyed it. It's the first in a series, so includes a certain amount of coming-of-age narrative: our hero, Rol, sees his family massacred, gets trained as an assassin, and becomes a successful naval warrior. The contrasting environments - especially the city where he gets his training, and a long desert interlude in the middle of the naval section - are very vividly realised. Possibly this demonstrates my own ignorance, but I felt no particular problems with a 17th-century-at-latest-plus-magic urban environment coexisting with 18th-century-at-earliest naval warfare in the same world. Will look out for later books in this series.
Paul was good enough to send me this after a brief encounter at P-Con earlier this year. I very much enjoyed it. It's the first in a series, so includes a certain amount of coming-of-age narrative: our hero, Rol, sees his family massacred, gets trained as an assassin, and becomes a successful naval warrior. The contrasting environments - especially the city where he gets his training, and a long desert interlude in the middle of the naval section - are very vividly realised. Possibly this demonstrates my own ignorance, but I felt no particular problems with a 17th-century-at-latest-plus-magic urban environment coexisting with 18th-century-at-earliest naval warfare in the same world. Will look out for later books in this series.