I decided to give this one a pass, it just wasn't keeping my interest. It wasn't bad and I liked the characters, the pace was just moving too slow for me and I found myself just wanting to move on. So I'm going to.

I had a very hard time getting into this book.

I felt like Keenen - this is going to slow.

I didn't appreciate having a man in love with another man or the descriptions of a man who loves his wife being attracted to the male courtesan.

Near the end it finally really gets going. But something happens that goes against everything Gracielis has been taught and we are never given an explanation as to why. ( )

Thiercelin begins seeing his best friend Valdarrien again, six years after he was killed in a duel. Thiercelin is a sensible man, and like all sensible men of his time does not believe in ghosts. Nevertheless, the apparition seems so real that he is forced to take it seriously. He seeks counsel from Gracielis, a man who was once his wife's lover but is now a courtesan and double (triple? quadruple?) agent. Gracielis is Tarnaroqui, a people rumored to have traces of fey blood, and unlike Thiercelin, he has made a lifetime study of the supernatural. But, bound as he is to his mentor, the perfidious Quenfrida, Gracielis refuses to help Theircelin. Slowly, it becomes clear that Valdarrien's ghost is just one part of a rising tide of magic that threatens to break the rational city of Merafi. Gracielis reconciled himself to the fact that he does not have the powerful will needed to be a great magician long ago. But when Merafi and his friends and lovers are threatened, he knows he has to do something. And so against his nature, against his nation, against his training, Gracielis strives to remake the bindings keeping Merafi safe.

This is not a typical fantasy novel, no matter the silly goffick cover art. The plot doesn't follow a single ordinary arc, but meanders through witty conversations and characters' internal ruminations, while in the background there is the rising tension and horror of Merafi's coming downfall. The magic surges into a deadly crescendo near the end, but for much of the book it is only hinted at. Sperring's magic is illusive and nightmarish, with rules that hold together but are never fully explained.

There's something of Guy Gavriel Kay to the characters, in the way they move through the Merafian court. Gracielis was my favorite--full of wasted potential, perpetually polite, secretly despairing. I really enjoyed the world building, as well--Merafi is like seventeenth/eighteenth century France, but without sexism (Thiercelin is the decorative lazy husband to the serious-minded, indispensible Yvelliane, who is First Councillor, a nice role reversal) or heterosexism (various characters have lovers of either gender, and no one thinks about it in the least). Sperring knows how her society works, down to the last detail.

The book takes a while to get going, but the leisurely pace of the beginning is necessary to give the reader time to assimilate all the tangled relationships between characters. I do think there were a few too many view point characters: Joyain and Miraude each serve to expand the world a bit, but their plots could easily have been shifted to other characters. Seeing through the eyes of Thiercelin and Joyain and Miraude and Iareth and Yvelliane and Gracielis and even, at times, Kenan and Quenfrida was just too much. Plus occasional third person omniscient! Too many viewpoints. Joyain is, additionally, the one character who annoyed me. Even after repeated visitations by ghosts, nearly getting killed by supernatural mists that sliced at his flesh, seeing his friend be torn apart yet speak through ruined jaws, repeated warnings by other characters--he STILL declines to believe in magic, and indeed spreads the magical plague throughout Merafi because he wanders around getting drunk instead of enforcing the quarantine, like everyone told him to. He was so self-pitying and dumb I could hardly bear it.

Trigger warning: There's a suicide attempt on page 209 that's up there with reading Sylvia Plath. If depressed, I really do recommend having something else to read or someone to talk to at hand when you get to that part, just in case. ( )

Tiptree shortlist 2010. The characters were mostly well-drawn and plausible; except for a couple of clunky scenes to move the plot along the story flowed quite nicely; and the ghosts and disease conjured up from river fogs were suitably threatening.
The only disappointment was that the Bad Guys'characters and motives were rather sketchy, and seemed peripheral to the main story. Anyway, despite those few nitpicks a very enjoyable read. ( )

I read this book second, though it is Sperring's first, and it knocked my socks off. It has some wonderful characters, of whom I grew very fond, and was hugely dismayed when some of them didn't make it (no spoilers). The bad guys were well drawn too and really horrible!

The eerie atmosphere builds steadily, and things become very dark, so one cannot imagine how the situation will be happily resolved.

I am very much looking forward to reading more by this author. I think I will be re-reading this book, as well as 'The Grass King's Concubine', which is a stand-alone book set in the same 'verse. ( )