This series. Wow. So different and unexpected than most everything else out there. And this second book that is so unexpectedly different than the first, that reframes and deepens and changes The Riverman as it expands that book's universe exponentially.
Years ago, when Meggie was just a baby, her father discovered he had a terrible and dangerous gift. He can ‘read’ fictional characters to life out of his books, but something always has to go into the book to replace them. When he reads aloud the book Inkheart, he releases angry characters into the world, but at the same time his wife disappears into the story. Later, when Meggie is 12, one of them comes back and abducts them, trying to force her father into his service.
One day, Eragon finds a polished blue stone when he is hunting in the forest. He thinks only that it might be able to help feed his family during the winter. But when a baby dragon hatches out of it, he realizes he has accidentally stumbled upon an ancient legacy as old as the Empire itself. Overnight, his life is shattered and he is forced to embark on a dangerous journey through the Empire that is ruled by an evil king who wants to kill him. With only the help of a powerful sword and an old storyteller, will he be able to take on the duties of a dragon rider and save the Empire?
Kyra is a highly skilled potions master, but she is a fugitive hiding in a deadly game of hide and seek with the king’s army and her ex-boyfriend. She alone knows the kingdom is on the verge of destruction so she is the only one who can save it. She must do what she does best, poison the future ruler and her very best friend. She is not alone, together, teamed with her potions, a pig, and a charming adventurer she can’t stop thinking about, she needs to find a way to defeat the princess before she is discovered.
Liyana has trained her entire life to be the vessel of the goddess of her village. She must dance to summon the deity who will then inhabit her body and use magic to bring water to the desert. But at the end of the dance, she is still there. She is blamed by her tribe and abandoned in the desert. She thinks all is lost until she meets, Korbyn, a god inside his vessel. He tells her that the other tribal gods are missing and they set off across the desert in search of the other vessels. The desert tribes cannot survive without their gods’ magic.
It's an occupational hazard that I read lots of different things for lots of different reasons. Don't get me wrong, they are almost all very good and I enjoy almost all of them, but there's the underlying awareness that I most likely wouldn't have read the majority of them if not for my job so they always feel just a little bit like work. Then there are books like this one that feel completely and entirely like fun.
Johnston weaves a beautiful tale of sisterhood and love, while re-creating the story A Thousand and One Nights. Similar to the original story, this is a desert setting and the king has taken 300 wives, one from each village, before coming to the village of our unnamed heroine. She asks her sister’s mother to help ready her for the king. She wants to take the focus off of her sister and offer herself to the king instead, in order to save her sister. She is swept away with the king, as he has chosen her, and taken to his palace.
The princess is soon to be married and not very excited about the prospect. She believes a life of matrimony will be the end of her ability to live her own life and make her own choices; she will be required to live and choose for the king and the kingdom.
The wild, unpredictable shapeshifter Nimona has just appointed herself sidekick to archvillain Lord Ballister Blackheart, promising to aid him in his quest to prove to the kingdom that the Institute of Law Enforcement and Heroics is up to no good. But NImona doesn't play by the normal rules, and she quickly has everyone in an uproar wondering just who she is and where her mysterious powers come from.
Alternating chapters tell the intertwined stories of Laia and Elias, who find their paths converging through Keris Veturius, Commandant of the Martial Empire's elite military academy. The Commandant loathes Elias, her accidental son whom she tried to abandon as a newborn, only to see him rescued by others and become the top student of her current graduating class. Elias wants nothing more than to escape his future as an enforcer of tyranny, but to cross the Commandant and the Empire is sure death.
