What sort of world would one inhabit, if, abstract thought and desires could be bound into a creature? What sort of creature would you birth with a flawed creator? In A Shadow of Summer, Daniel tackles a system of magic that I have not entirely seen before and--will probably never forget.

An idea that lives and is bound to its creator, where its purpose is to serve and continually look for means to break that servitude. It brings power...and it brings danger.

In the country of Saraykeht, the captive spirit of Seedless brings prestige, money, trade and peace. But for how long? What schemes does Seedless hold to break free of its imprisonment? And in the shadow of such peace, rumors of a growing threat to Saraykeht abound: a seemingly numberless horde of Galts held at bay by Seedless, plot to undo the spirit and the city itself.

Will they succeed?

Daniel's writing is a mixture of pure poetry (easily understandable however), and vivid emotion. This book came as a complete surprise-love to me. I did not go into this book expecting much as it was from an author I had no previously exposed myself to (and wow, do I feel dumb for that.) He tackles so many things in this book and the next that I'm at a loss to outline them all...And he does it masterfully.

A good balance of friendship, family, betrayal, love and despair. The dialogue and descriptions balanced each other out. I didn't find myself at a section that I felt bored enough to skip. I WANTED to read it, I WANTED to know what would happen next. In fact, I lost too much sleep devouring these books entirely once I started.

If I could give it a 6000 out of 5 or 10 stars, I would. Suffice to say, I highly recommend sampling these and checking them out.  ( )

I enjoyed this but I didn't love it. It has an interesting idea for magic but it's main theme is politics - the plotting for power and the removal of power, the slavery of an "other". Some of the characters were well developed and memorable but I did have issues with some especially in the second book. I just kept forgetting who they were. It also has a particularly unpleasant succession plan ;) I will read the final 2 books but not yet. ( )

This copy is book 1 & 2 of the quartet that makes up The Long Price.

It took a bit of time for me to get into this book, but boy it was worth it.

I generally prefer more action, more *BOOM* so to speak than this series offers so far.

The Long Price however does have very good writing, emotion, a unique magic system that, although central to the story is not used very often and quality world building with a very Asian feel instead of the normal Euro-Centric type we see most often.

This is definitely an enjoyable read and I look forward to sitting down with the second half in a few days. ( )

Two books in this, and they really are two almost completely different stories, including some of the same characters in the second book, a dozen or so years later and at the other end of the country. There are some themes that carry over, some that counterpoint.

First, let me talk the world and the rich, glorious detail of it that seeps through in the crack of every lovely sentence Abraham crafts. Because I'd read a hundred and more pages of this without any clear driving sense of the story, but the world was just so magnificent and interesting and rich that I didn't care. It's intricate and charming and ruthless and I could just marry the concept of magic through binding a concept in poetry. MARRY IT.

When I finished A Shadow in Summer, I was a little confused about how small and careful and gentle a story it was - a tale of how much a person can take and bend, or break, and what we'll do to avoid greater horrors. This isn't something you see a lot of in fantasy - fantasy tends to be about the greater horrors, about war and acts of fell enormity and magic that can change the fate of the world.

Having finished the whole thing, I look back and see that Summer, too, was a tale of self-authored personal tragedies. It's just that A Betrayal in Winter was a sweeping, blistering, majestic delivery of tight-bound, screaming-inevitability self-authored personal tragedies. It's Shakespearean. It's Russian. It's a thousand twists of the knife that cannot be dodged without changing, fundamentally, who the characters are.

I am so impressed.

So while I have absolutely no idea what could possibly transpire in the third and fourth books of the series - there's still no driving direction to the overall story, and it wouldn't surprise me to jump another dozen years and to another location with another character (I have my suspicions who) - I will be getting on board, because this is some great storytelling write up my personal-tragedies alley. ( )

(Re-posted from http://theturnedbrain.blogspot.com)

There was this fantasy series I loved like a mad thing when I was about fourteen or so, but I won’t say which one as I don’t want to spoil anyone. There was one character in particular I was very fond of, a dashing young prince. The trilogy, among other things, followed Prince Dashing on various adventures until he saves the land and his lady love and lives happily every after.

But the author did not stop with just this trilogy, he went on to write many (many, many) more set in the same universe, one of which was set seventy or so years after the original trilogy. This new trilogy opens with a courier announcing to a country town that the Prince from the first trilogy had died. At 80. By falling off his horse. Over ten years later and I still remember the specific details.

When you think about it, dying of natural-ish causes at 80 is pretty much the most anyone can ask for. And yet, I was gutted. It took me a long time to bring myself to return to the new trilogy, and I never was able to enjoy it fully. It was just too sad, seeing the characters I had loved so much become old and weak. In my mind Price Dashing had exsisted in his prime, but now that memory was replaced by 80 year old dead Prince Dashing. I just couldn’t shake the feeling of melancholy.

Which brings me to Daniel Abraham’s Long Price quartet. I've seen a lot of words getting used to describe these books: Underrated, amazing, masterpiece. And I’m not suggesting that those words aren’t apt, because they are, but for me only one descriptor truly applies; melancholy. Because like mystery author of my youth, Danial Abraham also employs the big jump forward. An average of fifteen years passes between each of the Long Price’s four volumes, so the characters we are introduced to as teenagers in volume one are nearing the ends of their lives by the last.

I mean, yes, these books are amazing. The world building is nothing short of stunning, and the prose is just beautiful. More than once I was stopped in my tracks by the sheer elegance of a metaphor or line of description. But it’s just so sad, watching the characters grow old.

Watching how time ravages not only their bodies but also their relationships with each other. Sad, but also pretty damn impressive. I myself have little experience with growing old, but it feels like Abraham nailed it perfectly. Writing from the point of view of a much older character isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it carries more gravitas in the Long Price. The older character watching the younger character making the same mistakes they did carries more weight somehow when you were in that characters head while the made the mistakes. I don't think I really understood the folly of youth v. the wisdom of age before.

It might be easy to think, with all this talk of aging, that the books lack excitement, (which is exactly what I would have thought, if I’d known about the time jumps before hand). But it’s not the case! Set aside the fact that Abraham's skill grows viably with each book, and so to does our bond with the characters strengthen, the plot of each book just gets more and more thrilling. The stakes are upped in each volume, so where the first books deals primarily with the relationships between the characters, by the fourth volume empires are crumbling. The third volume, An Autumn War, was my personal favourite of the bunch and an excellent example of how to build suspense, and how to build it damn well.

Overall, these books are bittersweet. It’s a unique experience to stick with characters well into old age, (at least in this genre), and watching them age is very sad. But then we also see the birth of new characters, and new hope, which balances out that sadness out. Kind of like real life, I guess.

So, is the Long Prince quartet an easy read? Not even a little bit. But you’d be mad to pass over it. ( )