Two parallel stories alternate in this compelling new fantasy.  Sadima, marked as different by her ability to speak with animals, joins the household of the coldly brilliant, ambitious Somiss, who is obsessed with returning true magic to the world.  As Sadima, in love with Somiss’ servant/companion Franklin, learns the depth of Somiss’ cruelty and selfishness, she becomes enmeshed in his powerful influence, as helpless as Franklin is to leave him.

Generations later, in a society run by magic, despised second son Hahp is apprenticed to the now-wizards Somiss and Franklin. Hahp and his classmates are brutally isolated from one another in an underground training center from which only one of them will emerge; those who fail to learn the wizards’ techniques slowly starve to death. As Sadima’s and Hahp’s stories unfold, grippingly, often with episodes that resonate across the generations and alternating cliffhanger chapter endings, puzzle pieces begin to fall into place, but questions remain: how has Hahp’s society emerged from Sadima’s? And what has happened to Sadima in the interim?

The twin resolutions at book’s end are only temporary pausing points in the stories’ headlong charge, but they fully earn the measure of satisfaction they give. Duey sweeps readers up in the page-turning excitement, making this one of the more promising fantasy series beginnings of recent memory.

In the darkly atmospheric fantasy, the first in a planned trilogy called A Resurrection of Magic, Duey weaves together the stories of two teens who live in a world in which the working of magic has a turbulent history. When her bitter father dies, Sadima, a young woman who can communicate with animals, keeps house for two renegade magicians at a time when magic has been outlawed. Her experiences, which include learning to read and falling in love, alternate with those of Hahp, born generations after Sadima.  Exiled by his wealthy, disapproving father, he attends a school of wizardry where, among other unpleasantness, students are starved to death if they can’t conjure up food. The pacing in this page-turner accelerates as the stories progress and links between them emerge, moving toward a cliffhanger ending that will leave readers anxious for future installments.

This double-narrative fantasy begins slowly but deepens into a potent and affecting story of struggle. First, a small farm boy begs a magician (healer) to help his mother through childbirth, but the magician’s corrupt and leaves the baby on the floor and the mother dead. The baby is Sadima.  Sadima grows up able to read animals’ minds and eventually seeks the city, where she joins two intense young men: tempestuously abusive Somiss, madly trying to recapture ancient languages of magic, and Franklin, serving Somiss with odd devotion. Somiss claims his work will restore banned magic and help the poor. In a second storyline, a boy named Hahp is sent to a magicians’ academy where he’s starved, abused, and taught meditation. Only one boy will live to graduate as a wizard, and they’re forbidden to help each other survive the filth and hunger. Some painful connections between the two narratives emerge, though key details—the fates of Sadima and Hahp—wait for the sequel. Darkly resonant.

Gentle Sadima becomes an uncomfortable third in the complicated partnership between idealistic Franklin (whom she comes to love) and perpetually angry Somiss, who is obsessed by his desire to bring magic back into the world.  In a parallel story, young Hahp, disinherited by his rich family, and Gerrard, a slum-born orphan, are trapped in a school where no one is allowed to un-enroll and students die in their attempt to become wizards.  The brutal school that Hahp and Gerrard attend is actually Somiss’ academy, the fruit of his early struggles to reinstate magic, and Somiss story with Franklin and Sadima is the prequel to the young boys’ time in school. Somiss, casually cruel, stands at the nexus of the two stories; he is a man willing to sacrifice nearly anything to achieve his goals, and at the end of the first book in the Resurrection of Magic trilogy, is it unclear how far he will go. Readers will be quickly captured as much by the mystery of the connection between the two stories as the relationships that Duey skillfully develops to tell the seemingly disparate tales.  Sadima and Franklin’s slowly evolving romance is set against the troubled relationship between Franklin and Somiss, while Hahp and Gerrard struggle with their humanity in a place where they are told that to help each other means failure. The school-story setting, which mimics the ascetic feel of a religious school, is startlingly harsh, and it creates a dramatic foil for the more domestic feel of the Sadima-Somiss-Franklin triangle. There is a lot to appreciate here: intriguing characters in challenging situations, the hunt for the roots of magic, and the struggle between humanity and obsession—meaty stuff that will appeal to readers, who will devour this book and eagerly await the next in the trilogy.


Locus, 2008, Gary Wolfe

Most reviewers get reminded on a fairly regular basis of books that we've overlooked, so when Kathleen Duey's YA novel Skin Hunger was brought to the attention of our esteemed reviews editor — after having been a finalist for last year's National Book Award in Young People's Literature — I got a copy, and it didn't take long to see why we might have overlooked it. Despite an impressively brooding David Ho cover, it bears a title that could easily be taken for a generic zombie or vampire tale (though it turns out to mean something quite different), an author who despite some success in the YA field has remained largely invisible to the genre community, and a warning that it's the first volume in yet another trilogy, bearing the overall title "A Resurrection of Magic" (by now, you could pretty much start a monthly book club of tales involving the return of magic to the world). But it turns out that Skin Hunger is one of the more accomplished and original fantasy novels of the year, and the trilogy it inaugurates might well constitute a major work (the narrative here is too truncated to claim that quite yet). There are a lot of strategies available to authors launching trilogies — they can write a more or less independent novel to be followed by sequels; they can complete a limited story arc within the context of a larger unfinished arc; they can write a movie-serial cliffhanger; they can simply stop the narrative at an appropriate breakpoint, with the understanding that the major issues are left unresolved. Duey chooses a combination of the latter two strategies, and it's inevitably a risky choice — some readers will feel that the tale just stops in midstream, or that it's only a fragment — but when the strategy works well, as it does here, it can be ferociously compelling: Duey may or may not know exactly where she's going, but this is clearly a story that wants to be told, and, so far at least, it's a supremely honest and perceptive fantasy.

And it's also a fairly dark one. The story alternates between the third-person narrative of Sadima, a young girl growing up in a world in which magic has been reduced to the depredations of charlatans but who finds in herself a talent for communicating with animals; and the first-person tale of Hahp, a wealthy merchant's disdained second son sent to study wizardry at a draconian monastic academy where students who fail to learn magic are simply allowed to starve to death — a kind of Hogwarts as Gulag. It takes a while to realize that these narratives are set several generations apart — Hahp's tale seems to take place a couple of hundred years after Sadima's — and that they're connected. Sadima, whose mother died at the hands of a fake magician while giving birth to her, lives in a poor rural family which despises anything to do with magic, and her relationship with her father is strained by the circumstances of her birth. She meets a kindly young man named Franklin, servant of the brilliant young aristocrat Somiss, who has heard of her magical skills, and after her father dies she sets out to join them in the seaside city of Limòri, becoming a kind of cook, scribe, and all-around manager for the humane Franklin and the volatile, reclusive Somiss, who is determined to rediscover the ancient secrets of true magic and establish a kind of academy, despite the opposition of the royals and of his own family. Meanwhile in the future, Hahp, whose wealthy family lives in the same city of Limòri and who also has issues with his dad, learns that being sent to study at the wizards' academy is very nearly a sentence of death — supposedly only one of the students will actually graduate. Still, all the students come from wealth except Hahp's roommate Gerrard, who he initially calls "Fishboy" because of his lowly origins, and whose presence there is unexplained. There is absolutely no redeeming warmth in Hahp's brutal tale — the students readily turn on one another (and are warned against helping each other), the instructors are unyielding, students actually die as warned, and even the hope of survival is tinged by bitterness and plans for revenge.

So when we learn that Hahp's major instructors are Franklin and Somiss, a host of intriguing questions arise: how have they survived the centuries? What became of Sadima? How did the promise of returning magic morph into this nightmare of brutality, and how does it actually function in this new world? Duey's view of magic is incisive and morally complex, and her skill at developing the central characters of Sadima, Franklin, and Somiss is equaled by her convincing sense of place — what we see of the city of Limòri, whose history seems somehow bound up in the narrative of the unwritten centuries, almost echoes the rich and grotesque New Weird settings of Miéville or Harrison (but more about that in a minute). Duey is clearly tapping into something powerful here, and if the remainder of the Resurrection of Magic plays out at this level of intensity, it will easily take its place among those YA trilogies that ought to earn the attention of fantasy readers of any age.