This is the first new review I’ve done since September. Working as a substitute teacher and maintaining a handful of other jobs have taken up a fair amount of my time, so I haven’t been writing as much or supporting other indie authors as much as I should. That’s not a great excuse, and I mean to do better in the near future. Now, this latest review (number thirty-eight) is on Morgan Smith’s Casting in Stone. Way back in August 2016 I reviewed Smith’s A Spell in the Country, which is one of the best indie fantasy novels I’ve come across. You can read that review here. Both of these books are in Smith’s high fantasy series The Averraine Cycle, taking place in the same world and referencing some of the same locations and history, but not sharing characters or plot points.
Like A Spell in the Country, Casting in Stone is told from the first person point of view of a tough and fierce warrior, a woman in a medieval-esque land of castles, knights, and dangerous magic. Our hero is Caoimhe, an orphan with notoriously ill luck and a penchant for killing. In a flashback we learn that she served as champion for a young duke named Einon during a period of power struggle and court intrigue in the town of Rhwyn. There were a lot of court intrigues in the story, and I regret to say that I couldn’t very well keep up with all of them. The main story was centered on Caoimhe’s investigation into a curse that she believes has been plaguing her, and the ways that the people around her manipulate her to keep her ignorant of the curse or help guide her to discovering the source of the curse.
There’s some action in the story: descriptions of one-on-one battles between champions, descriptions of skirmishes against feral supernatural wolves, battle against wicked supernatural entities. With the descriptions of fighting and the daily routines of being a soldier in this kind of grim pre-industrial fantasy world, the author spares no detail. The weapons and processes and fighting techniques are elaborated in a way that reveals how much time Smith researched her source material, creating a very believable setting. This was the case in A Spell in the Country as well, and I’m again impressed and inspired by it. In my own fantasy work, I would do well to imitate that commitment to research. That being said, there were long stretches of the book where things moved slowly, and where I really wanted to see more things happening. Where the story was interesting, it was great, but there were stretches when it dragged on.
As someone who appreciates quality high fantasy, I definitely appreciated this book, and I think other fans of the genre will appreciate it as well. I’m keeping an eye out for other works in The Averraine Cycle.
Now, once again, my bit of promo. If you are a fan of fantasy, you can look into my own book, Tales of Cynings Volume I, in print format here or Kindle format here.
Cameron W. Kobes 