Oh, how I adored the cover of this book. I thought it was so very cool that I may have had overly high expectations in reading this.

The story takes place in Korre, a world torn by war and prejudice. Part of the story is told in first person by a young female acolyte(I don't think we ever get her name) who is essentially trapped in a convent of "sisters" who embed precious stones of various types into their eyes. Once these new "eyes" are placed, they are granted powers conversant with the precious stones and believe themselves to become the mouthpieces of various goddesses. Given power to envision the future, she forsees a terrible fate which will come upon her people. Determined to save them, our heroine begins to devise a plan that will lead her to freedom before it is too late. The other major character, whose story is in third person, is Aaron, who is on a desperate quest to save his sister. He is a member of the oft-enslaved Noble Savage race, the Tonk (somehow, it came out in my head as "honk," which didn't help.) Overall, there was a lot of promise there; I just felt the story didn't follow through.

I found some of the story elements problematic. For one thing, I had issues with the balance of climax and downtime. I felt oddly "cheated" that our heroine, solo and completely alone, ends up discovering that hover for spoiler; at the same time, I felt that her hover for spoiler. Throughout, the problems and solutions felt somewhat contrived to me. In addition, the book dealt with oracle demigoddesses, and that's always tricky to pull off well. I just don't think Lisle managed it. The oracle skills were used repeatedly as excuses for deus ex machinas, while at the same time, introducing some significant plot holes.

One thing that wasn't fond of, but that will vary by taste: Lisle tends to "threaten" punishments or outcomes repeatedly. There were several "fates" that the characters mentioned and dreaded over and over and over and over. And then without fail, said events occurred, but since of course our protagonists have to make it through a reasonable portion of the book, the events turned out to not be particularly bad. The antagonists were all bark and despite all of their efforts, simply had no bite. For me, true horror comes from the unseen and unexperienced, from the terrible paths that the imagination can take, and true enjoyment stems from the unexpected. I was able to predict most of the "twists" that occurred in the book; the few I wasn't felt to me like Deux ex machina. As someone who reads mostly mystery interlaced with non-traditional fantasy, I know my irritation at this is far from universal, but it greatly detracted from my enjoyment.

Characterization is very important to me, and I felt that most of the characters lacked...well...character. They tended to be essentially perfect actors, completely without self-interest and fully willing to take all sacrifices for the good of their people, etc. Honestly, they also just weren't that bright. I like characters to be complex and with areas of shade and light. I encountered the same issue with the political message that Lisle seemed to be advocating. Certain groups of people were simply too evil, or too idealistic, to be plausible to me. Guess what? Slavers are Bad People. There is no complexity to evil characters; they are pretty much either evil for power or evil for the fun of it. To keep the balance, the good races/ people are of course essentially perfect. There was also a romance that just seemed contrived and awkward. However, at the same time, I found none of the characters jarring or unsympathetic. I also thought the moments leading up to the climax were very well done, and Lisle's ability to pull the reader into her world is brilliant. Although I couldn't warm to the story, the original concepts and detailed world make it an interesting read. ( )

Every once in a while, I need to take a break from debuts and read something by a seasoned writer. I have not read a Holly Lisle book since the 90s, when I read The Secret Texts trilogy. After finishing Grimspace, I looked for something different. And since Tor has been filling up my to-read pile with lots of nice hardcovers, I thought I'd choose something from that stack. Lisle was the most familiar to me.

Holly Lisle has published thirty or so novels. She is famous for being very supportive of aspiring writers, and her website is a treasure trove of information. You can tell just by looking at her site that wow, she's been writing for quite a while.

Read the rest of my review at Fantasy Debut. ( )

Hawkspar shares the fascinating world Holly created for Talyn, but is not dependent on the early book except for a small bit of crossover. While Talyn focused in on the Tonk and their culture, Hawkspar takes us much further, both in physical movement and in broadening our knowledge of the world itself.

The story begins with a young woman who was captured into slavery at a young age. She was bought by a rigid monastery culture where she has endured years of training designed to strip her of individuality and absorb her into traditions that include feeding those who disobey to starving rats while the rest of the monastery watches, a warning as to their own future.

But this young, nameless woman remembers only one thing. She is Tonk. That’s enough to sustain her, enough to drive her into a dangerous subterfuge as she plans to free not just herself but all those others who have secretly joined in her cause. They seek freedom from the dictates of the Oracles, women bound to magical stones that sit in the place of their eyes and offer up powers that kings have paid handsomely for.

A wish, a hope, a prayer, cast into the shower water is sent out through the drain and across the ocean to draw the attention of a Tonk tracker, the last of his family barring the sister he seeks still. He had returned from his manhood ceremony to discover slavers destroyed his home, taking his sister and others who did not die in the fight with them. He and a close friend vowed to find her, a task more and more hopeless as the years fade, but one he refuses to set aside.

The Tonk slave’s cry offers again that glimmer of hope, enough of one that he’s willing to leave his current company and become a captain of his own ship even when acrimony from his former captain fights him every step of the way. He plans to cross deadly waters and enter uncharted lands in a ship raised from the bottom of the sea with a crew gathered from the few greedy enough to sail with a madman to rescue this Tonk and the slaves she says are with her even though wiser heads claim it a suicide mission.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg that is Hawkspar. The characters themselves are largely ignorant of the extent to which their lives have been drawn not by the gods they claim, but by an enemy only the tainted eyes of an Oracle can see, and then only in glimmers.

This story is easily hands down the most complex of Holly’s works I’ve read, and that’s saying a lot. There’s action, adventure, romance, tragedy, politics, and war. The characters have everything set against them and then some, have help from unlikely allies, and danger comes in what seems to be innocuous. Once again the cultures are rich, detailed, and relevant; the enemies fall into both small and large, immediate and more far-reaching than anyone could have imagined. The ending is unexpected, but in a way so right that it’s wonderful, building on what happened before without their intent being clear until the moment comes. I love when books manage to surprise me in a good way so that I can see the roots of the event spreading throughout the earlier pages even though I failed to put the pieces together in the correct configuration.

If you love fantasy that focuses on cultures and people, if you want to see characters overcome seemingly impossible obstacles in unique and refreshing ways, Hawkspar will satisfy your desires and leave you craving more in this world, and more from such a skilled author. ( )

Summary: The Ossalene Order, a group of female mystics, recruits its members by purchasing young girls as slaves, and subjecting them to punishments and torture beyond imagining until their former lives are erased, and they become ready to take the Eyes of the Order, eyes made of stone which will leave them blind, but give them immense magical powers. But one slave girl fights back, concocting a plan for rescue... which catches the attention of the Hawkspar Oracle, whose magic gives her the ability to see - and alter - the currents of time, both past and future. Instead of punishment, however, the Oracle recruits this girl into her own grander plan, because they - along with many of their fellow captives - are Tonk, a fiercely loyal and clannish people. However, escape is only the beginning of the plan, for the Tonk are in desperate danger as a people, unknowingly fighting a losing war against an unseen enemy. In order to save a people she barely remembers, the young girl must face great personal sacrifice and take the Hawkspar Eyes, because they are the Eyes of War, and only with them will she have the power to do what is needed...

Hawkspar is set in the same world as Talyn, about 15 years later, and both feature the Tonks as their protagonists. Hawkspar is fairly stand-alone; the events of Talyn that bear on the plot are recapped clearly, although not until a fair ways into the book. However, I think that while it could be read as a stand-alone, it probably shouldn't - in part because Hawkspar is richer for already having a familiarity with the Tonks, their religion and culture, and their history, but also because Talyn is easily one of the top three books I've read this year, and anyone who is interested in reading Hawkspar would like its predecessor as well.

Review: The one thing that really stands out about Holly Lisle's writing is how brutally, almost unrelentingly dark it can be. There are threads of lightness, and hope, and love that run throughout her books, to be sure, but for large sections, the things people in her novels do to each other are so dark and so bleak that it can be viscerally difficult to read, each chapter revealing a new horror like a punch in the stomach, all the worse because it is human-driven and not supernatural evil. And yet, because she does balance it with believable, honest, likeable characters who fight against the darkness to preserve what they can of life, honor, love, and loyalty, the raw brutality gives her stories and her writing a power that it would lack if the darkness she portrays was toned down. That power was evident throughout the entirety of her first novel, Talyn, and it's present throughout the first half of Hawkspar as well. After that, I can't put my finger on exactly what changed, but the storytelling loses some of its immediacy, some of its intimacy with the characters, and thereby a fair deal of its potency as well. Perhaps it's because this book focuses largely on political maneuvering while Talyn was much more about one woman's personal fight, but Hawkspar just didn't have the same connection or make the same impact on me as the first one did. It was still an absorbing read, as witnessed by the fact that I spent most of the day unable to tear myself away from the last two hundred and fifty pages, but it does lose some steam halfway through. 4 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: I enjoyed this book, albeit not as much as I did Talyn, and if you're looking for a totally different flavor of fantasy novel than the standard magical-quest hero fare, you could do a whole lot worse than Holly Lisle. ( )

Amazon received