Self-Published Book Review: Spirit of a Kyrie by T. L. Rese
If you have a book you’d like me to review, please see the submission guidelines here. I’ve run short on books that I’ve received in the past year, so anything new has a good chance of being reviewed.
I’ve been at World Fantasy this weekend, and I fell a bit behind in writing this review, so it’s a little later than usual. World Fantasy was great fun, where I had the opportunity to spend some time with some of the esteemed luminaries of Black Gate, including Mike Allen and John O’Neill himself. Nonetheless I apologize for the delay.
This month’s book is Spirit of a Kyrie by T. L. Rese. Kityrah is a young girl with ambitions curtailed by her environment. Growing up poor in the Sallarah Desert during a famine, she and her brothers beg and steal to help their family survive on more than their meagre wolly herd. Her older sister arranges for her to be promised to the son of a wealthy family on the Shores, but Kit is unsatisfied with that life, and instead steals away to seek a new one. Through a combination of ambition and boldness, she manages to join the knights. The story is focused on her rise as a Hopeful for each of the various levels of knighthood, starting with Ash, then Furian, and finally Kyrion. For each level, she must pass a difficult and deadly test, one which most of the Hopefuls fail, many dying in the process.
T. L. Rese’s world is rich and detailed and very different from our own. A lot of the difference is in the little things: Coals that you can carry in your hand or your pocket, but that burst into flame on command. The shape-changing weapons carried by the knights, each class of knight bearing a distinct and lethal set of weapons. The wollies who seem to be dog-and-sheep hybrids, and the fire-breathing eira birds. With so much of the world different, it’s not always clear what you should expect. This is especially true when the descriptions are too spare, and the reader is left puzzling over why things work the way they do, expecting the rules to be the same as those in our world when they are not. In a few places, it sounded like the things Kit was doing were physically impossible, and I couldn’t be sure whether it was just that the world was different.
