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When eccentric explorer, Lady Vincenza 'Vintage' de Grazon, offers him employment, he sees an easy way out. Even when they are joined by a fugitive witch with a tendency to set things on fire, the prospect of facing down monsters and retrieving ancient artefacts is preferable to the abomination he left behind.
I won't, obviously: because - heh! expensive. And also possibly illegal, what if I hurt someone. But seriously, guys - whether you like fantasy or you're not familiar with the genre but are open to the idea of giving it a try (it might reassure you to know that it received a nod from The Guardian, no less - even though I do wonder if this Eric Brown person read the book before writing his article: Tor crass?! Puh-lease. The man is as haughty as they get and he would not appreciate being called "crass" by a puny human, not even one writing for a famed newspaper) do yourself a favor and grab The Ninth Rain, switch off your phone, tell your family & friends that unfortunately you came down with a terrible headache and really need to be left alone for a while, toss a handful of kibbles to your cat (it's not like she'll starve in a matter of minutes, despite what she wants you to believe) curl up on your couch and get ready for an Adventure. Lady Vincenza, popularly known as Vintage, is an eccentric scholar that will go to great lengths to understand what made the Jurelia(the invaders) invade Sarn(their world).The Ninth Rain won the Best Fantasy Novel trophy in British Fantasy Awards 2018; this is a totally well-deserved victory.
My favourite thing about this book is the relationship between the characters, they are so different, but somehow, they work well together. The fight scenes were well depicted, and the same goes for the magic system. I want to preface this by saying that I did enjoy this book overall and I am continuing with The Bitter Twins, part 2 of the Winnowing Flame trilogy. I do think it's worth reading if you're on board for a sort of 6.5/10 experience and just want a fun fantasy story that isn't too deep or demanding. The following is just my purging some of the thoughts that nagged me while I was reading. Where to begin? Okay,The direst consequence however, of the defeat of the Jurelian Queen and her people, was the death of Ygseril in the final battle. The tree god had delivered his final Rain and so begun the end of the Eborans. For while the humans believed Eborans to be immortal, their everlasting youth and health was derived from drinking the sap of Ygseril which they were now denied of. Eborans started slowly wasting away, until discovering that human blood was a suitable, if not nearly as potent replacement for the sap they so needed. What followed became known as the Carrion Wars, which at the height of it saw Eborans slaughter humans and drinking blood from their still warm corpses in the middle of the battlefields. Before things could get even worse though, what the Eborans believed to be their saving grace, became their eternal curse. A terrible, incurable disease, born of the drinking of human blood, befell these Eborans. They started dying slow and agonizing deaths and before long the Eboran population was decimated, with only a few Eborans escaping this fate. Reviled by humans, and as the last of their kind, they slowly disappeared until most people had only ever heard of them in stories, first as saviors and then as villains.
Consequently, The Ninth Rain utilizes many of my favourite tropes. The world of Sarn is very much dying and is slowly heading to its doom (or at least from the Eboran’s POV), which makes the stakes incredibly high. This book also has the found family trope, a unique take on a pet companion and powerful artefacts!The story is set in the world of Sarn - a world with a long history of conflict against an extraterrestrial foe, the Jure'lia (or "worm people"), who descended from the skies in their flying Behemoths to wage war against the people of Sarn, killing anything and anyone they come across before coating the land in a poisonous layer of varnish. Only the Eborans, blessed by the great tree Ygseril, were able to lead the defense of Sarn, fighting alongside mythical war beasts birthed from pods that fell from Ygseril's boughs in a "Rain". But, at the end of the Eighth Rain, the Jure'lia vanished, and the tree-father's leaves withered away as it died, leaving the people of Ebora both without the unique sap that prolonged their agelessness and without the war beasts. We first meet Hestillion and Tor as they are younger. Through them we learn about this illness called the flux and how it is killing Eborans. While Tor decides to leave, Hestillion stays and through her perspective, we see how badly the flux is affecting the once majestic city and its inhabitants. Hestillion is a character we don’t get to know much on a personal level, though I see that changing for the sequel. However, she is determined to save her people and that is by saving a tree named Ygseril, who is kind of a life line for Eborans. A lot of her story centers around this task that she has taken on.
Fluffy the Terrible: Hestillion names her war beast "Celaphon", after one of her favourite flowers. Said war beast is later fed Jure'lia growth fluid that causes him to grow abnormally large and vicious. Gone Horribly Right: Hestillion and the protagonists' attempt to revive Ygseril succeeds, but also ends up releasing the queen of the Jure'lia who had been imprisoned within its roots. Hello, my name is Sarah and I'm a bloody shrimping idiot who should be slightly (if mercilessly) skewered for thinking about DNFing this book. Yes, my Little Flimsy Barnacles, it is indeed very shameful and sad and disgraceful and stuff, but it is nonetheless (and quite dramatically) true: I read the prologue and the first two chapters of this book and thought, " please kill me somebody I'm outta here puny humans to chop into pieces places to invade and all that crap," and bloody hellish fish what a complete, utter, tremendously brain-dead nitwit that makes me.If you need any more reason to give the author’s books a go, she called herself a “100% Dragon Age trash”. As a fan of Dragon Age—especially DA: Inquisition—I’m not even ashamed to say that this awesome self-proclaimed title was one of the reason why I gave her book a go. Right for the Wrong Reasons: Micanal the Clearsighted was an Eboran artist who famous led a great expedition across the Boundless Sea in search of an island he called "Origin", so believed to be the source of the seed that had germinated into Ygseril, tree-father and root-mother of Ebora. And he was correct, but not in the way he had expected: what he found, rather than another tree-god, was the crashed spaceship of the alien race who had planted Ygseril's seed - just one of many they had planted throughout the universe as experiments. The revelation that the supposedly high-and-mighty race of Eborans were merely an (unsuccessful) experiment by a race of extraterrestrials was enough to totally disillusion Micanal, and he spent the rest of his days growing old on the island, haunted by his failure to save Ebora. To bloody shrimping think I would have bloody shrimping missed on such triumphantly incredible deliciousness, had I DNFed this bloody shrimping Piece of Dazzling Awesomeness (PoDA™) ← yes, this rhymes, I know. A poet is me and stuff.
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