RogerBW's Blog

2019 fantasy. Oliver is a very minor mage; he has some talent, but he's twelve, and he only knows three spells. But when the village is desperate for rain, and when a mob gets started, he finds himself (and his familiar) forced out with only the vaguest of instructions…

It's a bit of a change from the paladin-focused romances of the last couple of Kingfisher books I've read. Apparently this was originally pitched as a book for teenage readers, but the publisher rejected it as such; I suspect that this may be because the lessons Oliver learns on his quest are some of the really hard ones, which sit slightly uncomfortably with the cosy familiar trappings of fantasy adventure. (All right, Vernon's ghuls aren't exactly standard fantasy ghouls, and nor are her bandits exactly like standard fantasy bandits, but you can work out from the name roughly what they're like.)

Also there's an armadillo, Oliver's familiar, and if I see a certain resemblance to Mousebones in The Raven and the Reindeer and the weasel in Summer in Orcus I really don't mind; the small snarky sidekick is a type that Vernon writes really well. There's also some consideration of just what a familiar is and how that relationship might work.

It is, in the end, a fantasy quest, go to the place and do the thing, and it's hard to do much innovative with that. Even so, Vernon has written something that manages to stand out.