When the Empire attacks the small kingdom of Aydori, soldiers are sent across the border to capture the Mage-pack, the magic-wielding women married to the werewolf rulers of Aydori. Mirian Maylin, a young university student and failing mage, sets off to rescue them with Tomas Hagen, the younger brother of Aydori's ruling werewolf.

In this book, Tanya Huff has build a richly imagined and immersive fantasy world filled with interesting and nuanced characters. She uses a lot of tropes but puts her own unique and often unexpected twists on them that it all feels very fresh and new. It was interesting to see how the familiar alpha-beta/wolf pack tropes play out within the social structures of Aydori society, affecting not only the werewolves themselves but the mages and other people within their community. Huff really puts her on spin on it. I'm also thoroughly impressed by her extensive worldbuilding-- every bit of the world the characters inhabit feels very real.

The narrative jumps between four different POVs, which was a little jarring at first but I do like the ensemble cast and it allows us to follow a much bigger story than that of just one or two characters, and helps us see more sides of the fantasy setting. I also like that one of the POVs is an antagonist. Not all the POVs are interesting at first, but all the main characters quickly grew on me. Huff has a knack for writing fully-realized characters, and in particular, I love how she writes women and the relationships between women. In particular, I enjoyed the competitive, frenemy-type relationship between Danica and Kirsten-- it came off as being very emotionally true. The politics of pack relations also made for some very nuanced interactions between characters and I found it refreshing that relationships between characters weren't so easily characterized into friend, lover, enemy, etc. This gave the story another dimension of intricacy and subtlety, and I think it is a lot more realistic than having everything clearly demarcated.

The story itself got surprisingly dark and brutal in a few places. There are a couple parts that include some horror-like elements, but I liked that Huff didn't shy away from writing about truly awful situations. Overall this was an incredibly enjoyable story with a lot of surprises. I really wish Huff would write a sequel, as I'd love to catch up with the characters and see what they're up to after the end of the book. ( )

Satisfying and enjoyable. The ending is closed enough to finish the book but leaves room for another story (hint hint). ( )

Mirian is basically a Regency heroine who doesn’t want to go to balls and attract the right men that her mother wants her to—in a kingdom governed by good werewolves and being pushed to the brink by an implacable empire run by a mad emperor. A group of five women mages are kidnapped and taken into the heart of the empire; Mirian seems to also be targeted, but she and Tomas, whose closest friends have all just been killed in a terrible battle, rescue each other and go in pursuit. ( )

"The Silvered" is a fantasy novel with some very original twists on classic tropes relating to Werewolves and Mages. It also confronts the evil that can be generated when the actions of an insane leader are left unchecked in the interests of political and economic stability.

"The Silvered" is set in a world where werewolves (The Pack - male and mostly military) and Mages (The Mage Pack -female, gifted with scents that the Pack find irresistible and with a talent of Air, Earth, Water, Fire, Metal or Healing magic) form the ruling class of a small country that is being invaded by the ever-expanding Empire, a military state on the edge of its industrial revolution, that is just being to develop weapons that allow large scale killing from a distance.

Tanya Huff does a very good job of making her readers rethink their assumption in this book. Science is made to seem unnatural and somehow inhuman compared to the use of magic. Men who turn into wolves and the women who marry them, bear their children and support them through the use of magic, are made to seem civilised and honourable, while the human soldiers who come to rid the world of these "abominations" are made to seem brutish and or unthinking.

Tanya Huff uses the book to explore the use and abuse of power. She asks whether some things are simply wrong and not to be tolerated no matter what the cost of opposing them. She shows the way in which evil is unleashed when we dehumanise or demonise our enemies, turning them into things so that we can abuse and kill them with self-righteous impunity. She makes us consider the nature of duty and loyalty, the limits to following orders and whether it is treason to stand up to evil when it is being committed by your own Head of State.

The main characters are wonderfully drawn, both as people and as archetypes. Miriam, a Mage of apparently very little power, who takes on the Empire because it has to be done and she was the only one there, is brave without being heroic. Danika, the Alpha of the Mage Pack, who refuses to be give in to fear, pain, imprisonment or torture because she has a responsibility to the people she leads is not a fearless leader but she is a brave one. Captain Reiter, an Imperial soldier who knows the difference between what must be done in combat and what must not be accepted in everyday life and who can't help acting on what he knows. Then there is the beautifully wrought and horribly real evil of the Emperor: charming, charismatic, educated, gifted with an insatiable curiosity, in love with the scientific method and utterly, irredeemably insane.

Captain Reiter, forced to spend time in the Emperor's company, captures the chilling danger of the Emperor when he observes that the Emperor

"...didn't sound crazy when he talked. He sounded rationale. Scientific. Smart... When he talked, it was hard to remember what he meant."

I don't want to give the impression that "The Silvered" is a didactic work. It is first and foremost a wonderfully written, tightly plotted, edge of the seat, Fantasy novel. Tanya Huff effortlessly masters telling the story from multiple points of view, pulling the threads together with just the right amount of tension and making me care about each of the characters the story is told through. The world-building is first-rate, crammed with original ideas but never pushing so far into the foreground that the world eclipses the people who live in it.

I originally bought the audiobook version of "The Silvered" but I sent it back and bought the ebook version instead because I just couldn’t listen to Dee Macaluso murdering the text. What a shame that Marguerite Gavin, who did a great job with the "Confederation" novels wasn't given "The Silvered" to narrate. ( )

Loved it--I don't reread books very often anymore, but I will definitely be rereading this one. ( )