Book Review
of Firedancer Sponsored by Bewitching Book Tours
Firedancer
S. A.
Bolich
Masters
of the Elements, Book 1
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Sky Warrior Books
ISBN: 978-0615592916
ASIN: B005JMXIMG
Number of pages: 394
Word Count: 133,000
Firedancer
S. A.
Bolich
Masters
of the Elements, Book 1
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Sky Warrior Books
ISBN: 978-0615592916
ASIN: B005JMXIMG
Number of pages: 394
Word Count: 133,000
Book
Description:
What do you suppose that fire thinks about as
it cooks your dinner behind its cage of containment stone? Jetta ak'Kal
knows—but no one listens to a Firedancer who has failed to protect her assigned
village from an assault by living flame.
The Ancient, the strange, elemental fire
imprisoned at the heart of the world, took her lifemate, her reputation as the
most talented Dancer of her generation, and nearly her life. Now her clan
demands she redeem herself, yet seem strangely indifferent to her insistence
that the Dance itself that has always bound the Ancient seems to be failing.
Assigned to Annam, a village with no previous experience of fire, Jetta and her
new partner, Settak, find themselves battling the naive ignorance of the
villagers, the hostility of arrogant Windriders whose mastery of air could kill
them both with the flick of a finger, and occasionally each other as they
struggle to find new and more powerful forms of the Dance.
Pursued by fire crawling up through every
crack, by a new love she does not want, and a nagging suspicion that there is more
to her assignment than her clan bothered to tell her, Jetta must forge
unprecedented alliances in this high and beautiful place before the Ancient
breaks free—for if it does, there will no longer be anything left to fight for.
Author
Bio:
S. A. Bolich is a full-time freelancer who
writes on a wide range of topics ranging from travel to horses to web
design—and of course, fantasy and science fiction. A native of Washington state, she resides
there again after serving six years in Germany as an army military intelligence
officer. She graduated summa cum laude from college with a degree in history,
which she confesses was greatly aided by devouring historical fiction of every
era and kind through her formative years.
She is also a lifelong horsewoman and shares her knowledge in the
popular "Horses in Fiction" blog series at blog.sabolichbooks.com, in
which she helps writers keep their equines from falling into the trap of
Hollywood clichés.
Her first novel, Firedancer, Book 1 of the
Masters of the Elements series, was released in September 2011 by Sky Warrior
Books, with Book 2, Windrider, appearing in May 2012. Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath
Ceaseless Skies, On Spec, Damnation Books, and many other print magazines and
ezines, as well as the steampunk anthology Gears and Levers 1, the military SF
anthology Defending the Future IV: No Man’s Land, and the wolf-themed fantasy
collection, Wolfsongs 2. Currently she
is working on Seaborn, Book 3 of Masters of the Elements.
Website: www.sabolichbooks.com
Twitter: sabolichwrites
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/s.a.bolic
Excerpt:
Fire rose that night. Jetta jerked awake to a deep booming horn
shivering the glass in the windows and Nuurn's voice shouting, "Fire,
Jetta ak'Kal! Fire at the storehouses!"
She scrambled out of bed, throwing a harried look out the window.
She could not see the fire but she saw a glow, the size of which turned her
stomach to knots. Ruthlessly she suppressed it and charged down the hill.
Clouds had rolled in since sunset; it was black as the inside of Wind Point
between the houses, forcing Jetta to slow down on the uneven streets. Then a
huge shadow loomed out of the night and Rununn said breathlessly, "Follow
me, ak'Kal!"
His great hand caught hers and tugged; she followed, trusting his
night vision as he wove around hummocks and ruts. Her feet were wet and numb
from the chill dew on the ankle-deep grass by the time they dashed over the
slight rise and came to the first of the storehouses. Delvers with shovels,
with buckets and picks, some half-dressed, others barefoot, milled around
between her and the fire, determined to catch any spark.
"Let me through!" she shouted, pounding both fists on the
first broad back. Rununn cleared a path with indelicate shoves of a broad
shoulder and many a, "Pardon, master. Please step aside." that would
have set Jetta giggling at any other time. One Delver turned with a sharp,
angry protest, planting himself in Rununn's path. Jetta almost shrieked at
sight of Burrood.
"Remember yourself, a'Kam!" he snapped at Rununn.
"B--ak'Kal--"
Jetta, trapped amid a towering forest of giant Delver bodies, lost
all diplomacy. "Move!" she screamed at Burrood. "The
fire--"
Burrood opened his mouth, but what he might have said, Jetta never
found out. Rununn wrapped both strong young arms around the older Delver and
simply lifted him out of the way, his face averted from Burrood's astonished
outrage. Jetta darted through that convenient hole and halted, appalled.
Not one, but three separate fires burned on the road and in the
spring grass on the uphill verge. Settak faced the largest, an inferno in the
middle of the road roaring shoulder high with a yellow-white core. The other
two were spinning threads into the damp and verdant grass, finding it tough
going but racing to combine arms of knee-high reddish flame.
"Dancer, what do we do?" a panicked Delver shouted at
her.
Jetta gathered her wits. "Clear a line around those two!"
She pointed at the lesser fires, which would not spread quickly in that lush
grass. "And stay back!"
She ran to join Settak. Outmatched, still he bravely stood his
ground. As she came up beside him he thrust his hands out in the move that had
worked so well yesterday. The fire shied back but none of its flickering
branches sank or died. Jetta saw the failure hit him like a blow to the gut and
shouted, "Show no fear, Dancer! Take position on the other side!"
He turned his head and saw her. Relief washed into his face. He
nodded and spun away, terrified but still game. Jetta stepped instinctively
into the Dance, straight to the fifth movement.
No retreat.
The fire roared at her, malicious to its core. She felt its
hostility as she had felt it at Firehome, at Setham. Heat blasted toward her
and recoiled; she saw it withering the grass even where fire had not yet taken
hold. Sweat glistened on Delver faces at the edge of the light. She set them
from her mind, concentrating on the ground underfoot, reaching for the pulsing
power under Earth Mother's skin. She planted both feet in the dying heat of
ruined grass, uncomfortably warm for a terrifying, endless instant in which she
could not feel the run of the fire even with it towering in front of her. And
then it came, the sweet, staggering relief of the Dance connecting her
to...everything. Everything worth protecting.
The heat faded. The searing brightness dimmed as the air seemed to
thicken into a shield around her. The acrid bite of smoke and scorched grass no
longer afflicted her nose. Jetta scarcely noticed, for the center of the fire
faded to palest yellow and then to white, and a hysth burned there, cunning
vanguard of the Ancient, defying the Dance, the Mother. Her. Jetta set her jaw
and began to dance.
The hysth roared at her, divided itself and tried to advance on her
flanks; she stopped it with an improbable leap and twist that took her level
with shocked Delver eyes. On the edge of her awareness danced Settak in brief
glimpses of random movements, out of step with her own, disconnected, though
she saw that somehow he was keeping the fire from spreading on his side. He was
not Kori; she could not expect his efforts to lock smoothly with hers, but
still it distracted her on levels she barely sensed save in tiny jolts to the
smooth flow of the energy pouring through her.
Then a malevolent intelligence assaulted her, a driving need deep
underground. The Ancient. The hysth lunged at her, breaking out of its circle
to attack the ground at her feet, burning downward, striving to dump her into
the arms of the Ancient. Dimly she heard Settak's frenzied "Jetta!"...
Book Review:
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product or book may have been distributed for review; this in no way affects my
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