There is fantasy, and then there is fantasy. There are books that recount someone’s drab Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and then there are books that take you on a spiritual and magical journey, asking you to see things in a new light. There are lines in books like “The kobold’s mace bounced off my adamantine armor,” and then there are lines like, “Lying tangled with a nude sleeping nun, Aria knew she was seeing a whole new world.” There are books like CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: THE GOBLIN’S GRAVEYARD, and then there are books like R. Garcia y Robertson’s FIREBIRD. Without a doubt, this is in the top two of all fantasy books I’ve read over the past two years (the other being HIS MAJESTY’S DRAGON by Naomi Novik).
In this book, everyone is a Firebird, a phoenix rising from the ashes. Our heroine Aria starts off as a slave to the Bone Witch, but is awakened and reborn as the witch’s daughter with a task to save the Firebird’s Egg. Aria’s love, Sir Roye de Roye, a displaced French knight, starts off as a failed mercenary but is awakened and reborn as a noble who fights for his love and for the justice of the cause. Even minor characters, like the wildly saucy Sonya D’Medved, an irrepressible minx who teaches Aria the joys of Sapphic love, is reborn again and again as she comes through the most terrifying travails of war to serve the one she loves most dearly.
This theme of hope and redemption – even when facing the most grievous odds – is the core of the book and drives the story from its beginning of a chance meeting between Aria and the knight, to the climax of the return of the Firebird’s Egg to its volcanic nest and the rebirth of the land where Aria lives.
Garcia y Robertson takes a decidedly Russophile approach to the fantastic, and casually mixes scenes of great brutality and vibrant sexuality that probably make it inappropriate for the younger reader. But the sense of sarcastic humor displayed in witty throwaway lines, the soaring descriptions of the land and its inhabitants, and the intricate political manipulations in which Aria is forced to participate all combine to make this a thrilling adventure, much like the 1001 Nights stories that the Bone Witch would read to Aria at bedtime. This is a top-notch effort in a field all too buried in drabness. –Mark Rose
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