Lynn Abbey’s new book RIFKIND’S CHALLENGE features a woman of indeterminate age living in the desert plains of Asheera. Rifkind is a master swordsman, enough to set her apart from almost everyone. But she is also a witch, a master healer, in great demand but also greatly feared. The combination of warrior and healer is especially potent in this world. Her son, Cho, has trouble understanding his mother and resents her for her stoicism. Cho’s best friend, Tyrokon, is an Asheeran prince who has been hobbled since birth. It is this threesome that forms the core of the story.
Tyrokon knows he must leave Asheera. He cannot succeed to the chieftainship because he will be under attack from all the other Asheeran clans. It is his challenge to leave the land and find a new life for himself. Cho has yet to find out even who he is. His mother is nearly unapproachable and he has great bitterness and loss for the father he never knew. He has decided to accompany Tyrokon and his challenge is to discover himself. Rifkind has decided to leave Asheera as well and will accompany the two young men for at least a ways. Her work on Asheera has been completed. One night, she has a meeting with the goddess she has worshipped all her life, and the goddess has told her that she is a free woman, there is no need to bind herself religiously, that her destiny has been fulfilled and that anything that comes new will be due solely to Rifkind herself. This is Rifkind’s challenge, to rediscover herself in a new way.
Thankfully, Abbey is too much of a storyteller to drown her tale in all this pseudo-psychological gobbledygook. Instead, she puts the three characters on the road and lets the story unfold. We can feel Cho’s insecurity and his rage through his sullenness and his responses to a mother who seems emotionally distant. And we can feel Rifkind’s unusual weariness as she attempts to find a new life after the three or four she already seems to have lived.
But it is little more than a road tale, a story of three people encountering different cultures and peoples as they roam throughout the land. Their battles aren’t always physical, and it is their internal conflicts that help to make the story interesting, but there could have been a lot more development here, especially in the relationship between the mother and her son. Still, this is a good read for those who clamor for strong feminine role models in their genre fiction, without it being stereotyped as such. –Mark Rose
Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.
Related posts:
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }