The second book I read was Wyvernhail by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. I sort of wonder if its a bit like cheating, because it was a book I hadn't read in a series of books I've been reading for a while, but anyway, quick series overview: The main people of the Earth are shapeshifters, and the series focuses on three sects of these people, the avian (bird people), the serpiente (snake people) and the shm'Ahnmik (falcon people). The avian and serpiente's had been at war for centuries until (in the first book) the Serpiente Prince and Avian Princess married and bound the two courts together with their child (a "wyvern" Oliza), who is supposed to take over the throne when she gets old enough. . Which was all well and good until Oliza runs off with a wolf-shape shifter to live with her clan, leaving Wyvernhail without a Queen, which is where the book picks up.
Book overview: Basically Wyvern Court (the place where the remainder of the avian and wyvern race has come to live together) is in an uproar because they don't have a Queen, and the next in-line is Hai, a magically disabled formerly-insane half-serpiente half-falcon (no one really trusts the shm'Ahnmik) who still has magically induced black outs that tend to end in her uncontrollably large power attempting to destroy anyone and anything near her. Hai is also the main character of this book. This is a fantasy novel. Y'know, in case you couldn't tell. Atwater-Rhodes is very much a YA Fantasy novelist, and one of the main things that I noticed in this book, because it had been a while since I'd read the others in the series, was how well she recapped events that had happened already. Usually in just a sentence or two she identified people that had been around for the last four books, highlights two books worth of history in one of Hai's off-hand thoughts. I thought that this control, and the way Atwater-Rhodes is obviously very familair with the world she's created (the history is complex but believable, and even the languages she's created seem logical and well planned) were very impressive to me.
About Amelia Atwater-Rhodes:
- She published her first book "In The Forest of the Night" in 1999. When she was 14. Feel free to seethe along with me. (I read it when I was about 14, it was pretty good)
- She's been called the "teen sucessor to Anne Rice"
- She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Massachusetts with a double-major in English and psychology.
- She's published 8 books (all YA novels) since "In the Forest of the Night", five of which are in The Kiesha'ra Series
- She basically runs her website.
-Danielle
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