King’s Dragon
King’s Dragon is Volume 1 of the Crown of Stars series by Kate Elliott. Book 7 is due out on Feburary, so now it looks like a good time to get started with this series!
Elliott paints a world that is in parallel with one in our past — most of the world is directly from The Holy Roman Empire, with characters from the book drawn from people in that time period. The religion is close to Christianity but with some major differences. Instead of a Trinity there are two aspects to God — the Lord and the Lady. And the story of grace given by the Messiah is considered heresy, as well most performance of magic.
The greatest difference between the church in this novel and the real one is the role of women — women in Elliott’s church play a much greater role, becoming bishops, skopos (i.e. the pope). They can even be in charge of lands (and often are).
It was a nice change to read about an established church more like our own than the pagan -type religions in most fanasty series (or no religion at all in some). This was something that I could relate more to.
But was the story any good? Yes — very much. The beginning was slow, as Elliott was establishing the setting for the world but her characters are well thought out and believable. It starts with just two characters in different situations in what seems far out from the main action of the kingdom. But soon Elliott branches out and talks about more characters and you get a full scope of what is really happening in the kingdom. She handles the number of characters extremely — the pacing is tightly controlled and there is not too much switching to another character when one character is in deep trouble.
From what I can tell so far, is that in this world evil is really evil and good is very good — there doesn’t seem to be much gray area.
This seems to be the beginning of a great series. I hope that it continues to be good.