Amazon.co.uk Review
Second of the Sevenwaters trilogy of novels about the last days of heroic Ireland,
Son of the Shadows takes up the story of the children of Sorcha, who saved her brothers whom a sorceress had enchanted into swans, and Hugh, the Briton she married. Her daughter Liadan is a gifted seer and healer who thinks, in spite of her visions, that she knows what the future has in store for her--caring for her dying mother and then an alliance marriage to Eamonn. A chance meeting on the road carries her off to care for a dying man--one of the mercenaries of the sinister Painted Man, Eamonn's arch-enemy and a killer for hire. Liadan discovers that she cannot choose where she loves and that she and the Painted Man are as bound up in destiny as her mother and father were before her.
This is an intelligent historical romance in which the supernatural is a part of the character's everyday lives to an extent that makes it hard to think of the book as specifically a fantasy--these are people to whom the beings of forest speak on a regular basis and to whom sorcery is real. --Roz Kaveney
Product Description
Sorcha is the seventh child of a seventh son: but as a daughter rather than the seventh son he desired, she is neglected, having also caused the death in childbirth of her beautiful mother Niamh. Her six brothers, however (beautifully delineated characters, each of them), devote themselves to her and support her education in plant-lore, healing and natural magic. All is fine until the sensuous but evil Oonagh seduces their father, the warlord Colum, and sets about systematically breaking apart the family. When she catches the children plotting against her, she turns the brothers into swans, and Sorcha is set an impossible task in order to free them from her wicked spell. This is an old Celtic legend in its own right: brilliantly evoked and brought to life, amid raids by both the Britons and the Vikings. In the process of her task (which binds her to muteness until it is accomplished), Sorcha will meet and fall in love with a Briton warlord (the enemy), and against all odds their love will triumph. Like Marion Zimmer Bradley's MISTS OF AVALON or Jean Auel's CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR, this is first-rate historical fantasy that can have the widest possible appeal, taking in also the readership of historical fiction writers like Mary Stewart (THE CRYSTAL CAVE), Mary Renault (THE PERSIAN BOY) and Anya Seton (AVALON).
by Juliet Marillier
by Juliet Marillier
by Juliet Marillier
by Juliet Marillier
