The Poison Throne (Moorehawke Trilogy) [Paperback]

The greatest failing of The Poison Throne is its beginning: the first handful of chapters, which chronicle young Wynter Moorehawk and her ailing father's telling return to the Royal capital after a five-year exile abroad, are a rather muddled affair. And beginnings are imperative things - particularly the beginnings of fantasy sequences such as this, a far-reaching tale stretched out across three books (with a prequel still to come). Never is it more important to grasp an audience's attention than when setting out to tell a story that will take months, if not years of sustained interest to hear told in full, and debut Irish author Celine Kiernan seems too tentative in laying the necessary groundwork for the narrative to come.

It's not a matter of world-building, of which there's precious little of in The Poison Throne - though Kiernan gradually communicates all she needs to of the kingdom Wynter and company must somehow restore - but rather of character. The author seems to be getting to grips with her modest cast even as we, the readers, endeavour to begin an understanding of them, and though it's not long before their patterns and quirks are established, pivotal events - perhaps the most pivotal in all of The Poison Throne, which tells, for all its promise of greater things to come, a small and admirably focused story - pivotal events have passed by nearly unnoticed in the initial chorus of confusion that comes of a lack of proper context.

Better, certainly, that we felt their import in the first instance, but Kiernan, once she and characters have found their feet, shores up all that is of significance before the narrative progresses any further. Much of what follows is political maneuvering: courtly intrigue and princely hijinx courtesy of our teenaged protagonist's proximity to the titular throne, in desperate crisis after an attempted coup. Wynter's half-brother is next in line to rule the kingdom, but the people think Razi an unwelcome pretender; while her father would make for a valuable ally to the tyrannical monarch who sits for the 14th century, South of France-inspired kingdom - if only his health were to improve. Wynter is caught in the middle of it all, but wily and wise, she is far from powerless to stop the crimson tide of an uprising.

The unfortunate tentativeness that mars the first, foundling stages of The Poison Throne does nothing to diminish the energy and enthusiasm which Kiernan brings to her tale thereafter. The endless politicking might sound tiresome, and though it goes on perhaps a touch longer than necessary, the author's tremendously pacy prose and a cast of characters constantly in flux (once they've been established, that is) make all the puppeteering easy to swallow. Kiernan spins a colourful, vivacious web of a narrative that, while slow to come into its own, moves in time at an effortless gallop: from a trip to the dungeon with a forbidden feline to a fight with a drunken king, one delightful encounter follows another.

In the end, it's hard not to fall for The Poison Throne. It has a heart of gold that shines through from one cover to the other. It's not quite Young Adult fantasy - class conflict, racism and threats of rape find their way into the narrative - nor quite the full mature monty, but Celine Kiernan makes her debut work as something that straddles the line between the two. Down-to-earth, endearing and so energetic as to be exhausting at times, The Poison Throne is a fine first novel, and moreover, you get the sense that from here on out, things will only get better. Roll on The Crowded Shadows...

This book was a real surprise for me; when I started to read it I didn't expect to find the amount of detail and the intricacy of the plot that was present in this fantastic novel.
It really was a beautiful book - the level of detail when it came to the descriptions of Wynter's world was amazing and the characters all seemed real to me, in that they all had their flaws and were much more complex than most of the two dimensional characters we get to read about lately in YA fiction. Wynter could be annoying at times, but I identified with her and she was a worthy heroine; Christopher was my favourite character, he had a real story & an honesty to him; and I had to like Razi too, though sometimes I didn't really want to.
By the time it finished I was desperate to read the next installment, but unfortunately I'll have to wait until Autumn this year - I'll be counting down the days, seriously. (:

The reader is plunged into courtly intrigue and conspiracy from the first page and, along with the main character Wynter, only gradually finds out what is going on. Although this sounds like a jumbled recipe for disaster, I can not think of a better way of engaging the reader and really making them care for the characters and what happens to them.

They are all beautifully described - from the gruff cook to the tiny, frightened page-boys. Even those who have only the tiniest of walk-on roles is real and it was this, for me, which made it into a page-turner. The plot centres around Wynter, her father and her two friends Razi and Christopher and when last page arrived I was so wrapped up in their fate that I was sorely disappointed to realise I will have to wait for the second part of the trilogy.