Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt – Review

Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt

“Secrets of the Fire Sea” returns to the form of “Kingdom Beyond the Waves” with a superb tale that has sense of wonder, great characters, twists, turns and a new setting in the Jackelian world, the island continent of Jago described above.

“Secrets of the Fire Sea” starts as a relatively straightforward coming of age tale when Hannah Conquest and her ursine friend, young Chalph urs Chalph’s musings about their uncertain future are rudely interrupted by an unexpected notice of conscription for Hannah in the valve guild which keeps Jago going at the fundamental level of both computing and power source but at the price of the guild’s men and women physical deformities due to the high radiation environment. As a supposedly Jackelian subject by birth and destined for the Church by ability – let’s remember that the Circlist Church is a church of mathematics and rationality and the ordination exam is a sort of math PhD exam equivalent with a strong moral component – and by her position as ward of Archbishop Alice Gray, the conscription notice is odd to say the least, though its subtext is soon revealed.

Later on, we move to the second thread of the story and for a short time we visit the Jackelian capital of Middlesteel to see Jethro solving a case in the classical manner of putting psychological pressure on the suspects in a room. Despite being a defrocked parson for “having personal gods” and hating the Circlist Inquisition which decades ago had expelled him and ruined his betrothal to a rising star of the Church, Jehtro has to accept the League of the Rational Court’s commission for Jago and on he goes with Commodore Black who has been convinced by Amelia Harsh – the archaeologist heroine of Kingdom Beyond the Waves and now finally a university bigwig – to escort Amelia’s star pupil Nandi to Jago to continue the work of Hannah’s parents so tragically dead years ago after announcing some intriguing discoveries…

And so it starts, but the plot thickens very quickly with all the subtext of Jago, humans, ursines and crisis described above to which quite a few things get added soon. The author manages to keep a pretty complex plot under control and switching between the two threads allows both to explore more and more of the setting on Jago as well as advance the story sometimes in quite unexpected ways.

via Fantasy Book Critic: “Secrets of the Fire Sea” by Stephen Hunt (Reviewed by Liviu Suciu).