The Tower of Ravens by Kate Forsyth
September 14th 2006 05:55
The Tower of Ravens by Kate Forsyth
Kate Forsyth is one of the more promising young Australians who are increasingly working on the fantasy genre. I read somewhere that some of the top books written by Aussies these days are fantasies written by Australians. I think overall the fantasy genre is having a great boom here. Forsyth is not good as Juliet Marillier or as original as Lian Hearn but much better than Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Trudi Canavan or Tracy Donovan.
The Tower Of Ravens is the first of the trilogy called Rhiannon’s Ride. The trilogy is great fun because it features a beautiful heroine against whom so much injustice is piled up that you want to scream loudly. By the second book, you want to throw whatever you have in your hand at those evil schemers who plot against Rhiannon. Unfortunately, they are all there in a book.
Rhiannon is raised in a herd of satyricons. She is cruelly treated because she des not have a fully grown horn because her mother mated with a man. Rhiannon knows that the herd will kill her one of these days, so she plans to escape. She gets her chance when a human prisoner of the herd escapes and the herd is busy catching him. She makes her escape but has to kill the man in the process.
She does not know but the man was a soldier in the King’s service and Rhiannon running from the herd of satyricons falls into the hands of a family whose young son Lewen is also a soldier. They have a hard time restricting this wild uncivilised creature grown in the forest but soon Lewen falls in love with her even though he knows she may have been involved in the disappearance of his friend. He and his mother plan to take her to the court in the matter of the missing soldier and along the way they come across the Tower of Ravens, a sinister abode for a lord who is planning to invoke the dead and usurp the kingdom.
All in all, the book manages to entertain you through that most basic of the conventions: the damsel in distress. The damsel in question though kicks some ass. The novel loses steam in the second half where the action set in the Tower of Ravens is unexciting and standard. But I was surprised how Forsyth handled the material in the second book of he series, at the number of threads she was able to pick up from what I thought was rather a simplistic climax.
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