Stuff
Adobe DRM
Product Details
Scribner, November 2007
eBook, 400 pages
ISBN-10: 1416588477
ISBN-13: 9781416588474
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Description
Firethorn, the first volume in an epic trilogy, is a stunning debut. Sarah Micklem has introduced an unforgettable heroine into the fantasy pantheon. Loving, reckless, and indomitable, Firethorn travels through an imaginary world as real as history and as marvelous as legend.
Firethorn flees a life of drudgery to live alone in the forest, relying on her knowledge of herb lore to survive. She returns transformed, indebted to the god who saved her life, and blessed -- or cursed -- with uncanny abilities and a nagging sense of destiny. After a few nights of dalliance with Sire Galan, a high-caste warrior on his way to join the king's army, Firethorn seizes the chance to go with him, only to find she has exchanged one form of servitude for another.
The army readies for war in the vast encampment of the Marchfield, where men prey on each other and women dare go nowhere alone. Among the lowborn harlots and the highborn dames of the camp, Firethorn learns to use her gifts as a healer, venturing into realms of dream and shadow.
Desire drew Firethorn and Sire Galan together, but love binds them -- a love that has no place in the arrangement between a warrior and his sheath. When Galan makes a wager with disastrous consequences, Firethorn uses her gifts to intervene in his fate and learns just how hard it can be to tell honor from dishonor, justice from vengeance.
Sarah Micklem has written an extraordinary tale -- at once magical and earthbound, beautiful and violent. She immerses readers in a remarkably imagined world where gods are meddlesome, the highborn uphold their privileges with casual brutality, and a woman's only recourse may be the strength she finds within.
Read more:
Chapter 1How did you come to write this book?
I had already drafted a rough outline for my second book, the sequel to Firethorn, when I came across an account of “lightning shamans,” people struck by lightning who are believed to have special powers. When I read that, the plot elements shifted and locked together in a whole new configuration, and I knew what I wanted to do. But I was afraid it would be too hard. Suddenly I was reading about lightning injuries, brain damage, and aphasia, and trying to figure out how to write the fractured dialog of my protagonist, and trying to imagine how it would feel to have to reconstitute a shattered sense of self. The lightning strike didn’t change the sequence of my projected plot much, but it turned the meaning upside down, or maybe inside out.
Orson Scott Card
author of the Ender Cycle series
Micklem plunges us into a fully realized world, full of grit and beauty. She takes the time to let relationships develop and events unfold, giving us the sense of having lived and loved our way through Firethorn's world. Micklem makes a worthy bid to be ranked with Robin Hobb, Mary Renault, and George R. R. Martin as a brilliant creator of realistic, character-centered fantasy. My only complaint is that the second book isn't out yet."
Robin McKinley
author of Sunshine
This is a stark and splendid novel. But the most astonishing thing about it is the suppleness of the style
-- almost no one writes a first novel this graceful. I look forward to whatever she does next.
Publisher's Weekly, starred review
Micklem's majestic and powerful debut, the first volume of a fantasy trilogy, introduces a compelling heroine with a strong, original voice. A sweeping adventure saga as mystical as it is raw, the novel is also a biting commentary on violence and its effect on relationships defined by a caste system. Enriched but not defined by the influences of many cultures (Celtic, Norse, Egyptian, etc.) and authors as diverse as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ursula K. LeGuin, Mary Renault, Jean Auel, Margaret Atwood and, yes, even Tolkien, this hypnotic tale of passion and survival will resonate with sophisticated readers of both sexes.
Locus, reviewed by Faren Miller
"Expect the unexpected" may sound like a stale cliché, but applied to the future volumes of this trilogy, and the further career of Sarah Micklem, it becomes both a lure and a promise.
A.M. Dellamonica, Scifi.com
Engrossing, suspenseful and uncompromising, this is a novel that sets a great story into motion, leaving readers eager for the next chapter. Its story is so complex and compelling...it will seduce even reluctant readers.
Paul Di Filippo, Washington Post
[Micklem's] accomplished debut novel...is fresh and affecting....[Her] prose is stately yet sprightly, rife with gorgeous descriptions of landscapes and palpable emotions. And her feminist and political subtexts are mature and resonant.
Kirkus
Gritty, sinewy, exceptionally well researched, and highly impressive.
Paula Luedtke, Booklist
This is a great piece of gritty, feminist fiction, distinguished by a heroine whose vulnerabilities and fresh voice as narrator make her easy to love.
