Book Review: Breath and Bone by K. V. Johansen

Johansen’s penchant for epic fantasy distilled instead into a twisty sword and sorcery tale

Cover art by Laura Galli

It starts off simply, or seems to. Arrany, a young woman, is trying to get her twin brother free of the possessive control of a witch. She travels far to find a pair of godlings that have the power to free him. Or at least kill the witch. But the godlings are not who they appear to be, and neither is Arrany. And neither is the witch. What seems to be a simple quest across the landscape turns out to be a much more complicated affair than anyone anticipated.

Thus begins Johansen’s standalone sword and sorcery novel Breath and Bone.

In this review I want to discuss the form and nature of the book, its characters and its world more than a recitation of the plot points. And also posit an idea of theorycraft for genre.

Johansen has written a number of fantasies on a variety of levels, but is probably best known for her epic fantasy series The Caravan Road (starting with The Blackdog and ending with The Last Road). She has written a number of fantasies for children as well. But sword and sorcery is a stratum that she has not written to before. In her interview for this blog, she mentions that:

“… the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.”

And I do like this idea and want to explore it further. Pony and Hedge have DONE the epic fantasy thing, and Breath and Bone makes lots of deep references, allusions and connections to their past. In many ways, this novel is their past coming to impinge on their present. Their present was a quiet one, living in “retirement,” with the boundaries of their life much smaller. And the novel supports this by Arrany’s journey and the initial steps of their adventure to free her brother to be entirely within the sword and sorcery mold. It’s a low stakes and seemingly straightforward story.

It doesn’t quite stay that way, but it puts me in the mind of a D&D campaign starting at level 1. Low-level D&D characters are basically in a sword and sorcery story. They don’t have control of epic powers as yet (or if they are associated with one, they can’t handle it). Their foes are low level. The stakes are low. There is a wider, wilder world out there that the PCs will get connected to, one way or another, over time, but they start small. Over time, as characters rise in level, the GM provides larger and more world-spanning challenges and opportunities. Player characters’ abilities rise. Clerics can raise the dead. Wizards can cast fireballs, and then things like plane shift. Rogues and fighters grow epic in their combat abilities. In other words, the campaigns shift from sword and sorcery to epic.

So there can be a progression in fantasy characters, going from the sword and sorcery of a low-stakes and small adventure, all the way up to epic conflicts and grand fates. You don’t have to have this progression; you can dunk characters into the deep end, but generally the inciting incident or two can be of small enough stakes to feel like one is touching the base of sword and sorcery before launching toward more epic realms. The Wheel of Time television adaptation shows this tactic in particular.

In Breath and Bone, we have two characters, Hedge and Pony, who have gone all the way to the epic phase and to the other side, to retirement. They became movers and shakers, capable and willing to topple an emperor and his empire. They have left legacies and legends and their names across the landscape. But now they are retired, living in the aftermath, in a cottage in a nowhere village keeping waterfowl.

The call to adventure in Breath and Bone for Hedge and Pony, as they get wrapped up in Arrany’s plight, is like a “second childhood” for them. Although they have done the epic thing, the initial steps are pure sword and sorcery, low stakes. They meet bandits. They run into a stray old god. Arrany gets kidnapped, and her story begins to unravel as we find out there is much more she did not say, and that matters are larger than Hedge and Pony realized. The scope widens as this rebalancing of the narrative continues, as we reach the lair of the witch. It’s a slow and gradual widening, and the true abilities and powers of Hedge and Pony become terrifyingly clear.

I’ve seen the rise to epic power many times before, but this “second childhood” of retired heroes slowly getting back into it by means of a return to epic fantasy via sword and sorcery is somewhat less common in fantasy. There have been a spate of retired hero books, but generally, given how much fantasy as a genre is a “young person’s game,” having a retired hero return to the fold happens, but less commonly than you’d think.¹ So in Breath and Bone, the shape of a graph of time and stakes and scale proves to be a curve with two humps, with the first hump in the past, but as the story progresses in the new storyline, we get a new rise.

The backstory is key to all this. At first it seems like a simple story: Arrany is trying to rescue her twin brother from a witch, so she seeks out a legendary hero to help. But what the story slowly reveals is that “first hump” and just how dangerous Hedge and Pony were as renowned movers and shakers. We slowly learn just what deeds they are responsible for, and as the novel progresses, I felt trepidation that Arrany had awakened from retirement two very powerful individuals… and worse, has not been entirely truthful with them. Arrany asks two retired and extremely dangerous individuals on a seemingly simple quest but withholds key knowledge about herself and what is really going on. It’s a logline that is ripe for drama, action and adventure as we head across the landscape.

And the landscape supports this sword and sorcery narrative. Arrany travels across relatively mundane locations to reach Hedge and Pony, and as they travel toward the witch, their surroundings become somewhat more fantastic, particularly the inhabitants. By the time we get to the glaciated area of Under Ice, we have definitely abandoned the quiet and peaceful cottage for a wilder and more dangerous place. All through it, the lush landforms are wonderfully described. If the Caravan Road was based on the Silk Road, from the Caucasus all the way to China, this is much more of a glaciated Western Europe, with fells, lakes, swamps, mountains and eventually the border of the Ice.² Landscapes are important to sword and sorcery. Even if the range of possible locations is massive, from teeming cities to bloody frontiers, a sword and story story must give the reader a good sense of the landscape to be effective. Breath and Bone succeeds on this level. This world feels a bit like her epic fantasy The Wolf and the Wild King (with a sequel forthcoming), with the cold landscape and a huge lake as a central figure that a bunch of the action occurs in and around. But in all cases, the landscape continually invites the reader to step into it and imagine what the characters will run into around the bend.

The novel is a one and done, completing the story in one volume (a relatively compact book by Johansen’s standards but more in keeping with a sword and sorcery length). In the course of this book, Johansen unfolds a world, a set of characters, and a set of premises that invite the reader’s imagination. And, perhaps, it will spark the author to write more in this ‘verse. Find out more about Breath and Bone in the interview I did with Johansen here at Nerds of a Feather.

Highlights:

• Sword and sorcery from an epic fantasy writer
• Excellent characters
• A world that invites going around the next corner

Reference: Johansen, K.V. Breath and Bone [Candlemark and Gleam, 2026].

¹ The reference and tie-in I want to go with here is Alex Marshall’s A Crown for Cold Silver. The inciting incident is that a military force decides to decimate a small town. It just so happens that this town is the retirement home of general Cobalt Zosia. Zosia does not take this well, not well at all, and goes on a carefully constructed campaign of revenge and retribution. It is suggested at points that the attacking force was directed to make an example of Zosia’s village by someone who knew she was there, and how she would respond. Zosia had already had her epic adventure and was in retirement. She gets pulled out of that retirement and ramps up her revenge, and by books two and three in the series, we are firmly in epic fantasy territory once more.

² Sort of like a Western European answer to Michael Scott Rohan’s The Winter of the World. Also, the Doggerland books of Stephen Baxter, or the colder world of Kate Elliott’s Cold Magic series.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Interview with K.V. Johansen

K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish.

Today she talks to Paul about her forthcoming sword and sorcery book, Breath and Bone.

NoaF: For readers unfamiliar with you, can you briefly tell us about yourself and your work?

KVJ: I’m Canadian, living in New Brunswick on the east coast. I have Master’s degrees in English and in Medieval Studies. My first book, long ago in 1997, was a children’s secondary-world fantasy, very sword and sorcery, a quest to slay a dragon. Since then I’ve written something like 26 books for children, teens, and adults, including two non-fiction works on the history of children’s fantasy and, under the name Kris Jamison, a contemporary novel, Love/Rock/Compost, which no one has heard of but of which I’m very proud. Prior to Breath and Bone, my fantasy for adults has been the five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road, beginning with Blackdog and ending with The Last Road, and the high fantasy duology that begins with The Wolf and the Wild King and will be concluded in The Raven and the Harper.

NoaF: Can you give us a brief précis on Breath and Bone?

KVJ: The very short version is: two women (Hedge the swordswoman and Pony, a shapeshifting godling), who’ve been partners through long, long years and figure they’ve served their time in the suffering and heroing and changing the world department (what with leading a civil war, destroying the empire, and cutting off the emperor’s head), are pulled out of peaceful retirement when a girl recruits them to help rescue her twin brother, who’s gotten himself ensnared by a life-draining witch, an old enemy of theirs. And there’s a ghost.

NoaF: You've tackled epic fantasy, and fantasy similar to sword and sorcery, but what drew you to make this a sword and sorcery novel?

KVJ: I’d had the character of Hedge—the wandering warrior with a sort of trickster partner—kicking around for a while; she’s someone who was cut from an earlier and rather different version of The Wolf and the Wild King, actually. Her partner then was male, and a fox—he became quite a lot younger, and a child, and turned into the fox-girl Sage, so there was Hedge, all ready to wander into adventures, with no partner and no story. I was working on part two of The Wolf and the Wild King when a discussion about sword and sorcery gave me this sudden hunger for an old-fashioned adventure, lighter on politics and gods and dark grim torments of the soul.

“What I feel like reading,” I said to myself, “is something like Torrie, but for grown-ups.” Torrie is the oldest of the Old Things of the Wild Forest and the narrator of my several Torrie books, which are old-fashioned fantasy adventures for younger readers. (A lot of adults like them too!) Pony, the narrator of Breath and Bone, sprang more or less fully formed from that desire, and the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.

NoaF: Geography and landscape are important in your books, and Breath and Bone is no exception. What inspired you for the landscapes we see in the book, from the lake all the way to the Under-Ice?

KVJ: I was thinking mostly of western Europe as the inspiration for this one, with Hedge and Pony living off in the northwestern corner of that, on the shores of a small lake, so I had in mind a sort of impressionistic sketch of a landscape that was inspired by Swallows and Amazons combined with Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (about the Cairngorms in Scotland) along with various of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books set in the Lake District of England after Rome left Britain. Hedge and Pony’s travels take them down through lowlands and forests, along the valley of a great north-flowing river, to a suspiciously Alps-like mountain range and the ruins of Under-Ice, so you can picture that landscape as journeying south and east across something not utterly unlike a much more sparsely populated western Europe with more woodland, where primeval forest and megafauna can still be found. The marshes, Arrany’s homeland, came from the idea of Doggerland being above water, and part of that being a vast low-lying area at the mouth of a great river. It’s a place I’d like to explore and develop further.

NoaF: Rosemary Sutcliff—now there's a name drop. I read The Eagle of the Ninth after the movie came out. How did Sutcliff influence your development of this world?

KVJ: Rosemary Sutcliff was an author I read repeatedly as a child, someone who had a big influence on my style and on my fascination with history. Some of her books set in Britain after the withdrawal of Rome are among my favourites, The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind in particular. It’s natural that, with Breath and Bone being set in a world after the fall of a great empire, I found a Sutcliff sort of flavour creeping into how I thought about it. Dawn Wind, especially, contributed a mood to the world; it’s a book about two orphaned young people after the Anglo-Saxon invasions have begun and their communities have been destroyed. Searching for a place they can be safe, they wander through the ruins of Roman towns long abandoned and come across small isolated farms still surviving. Pony’s world took on that sort of colour, though hers is a more peaceful time with no Germanic invasions. In Pony’s world, there are old imperial ruins that have been taken over and given new purpose; the imperial highways still exist, though no one is maintaining them and they are slowly being overgrown by moss and engulfed in forest; and there are a variety of small, mostly human tribal territories and kingdoms, towns run by hereditary chieftains or councils of clan elders, a few surviving cities or towns that have become new centres of trade and are growing into independent cities run by councils or guildmasters or powerful families, and in a couple of cases, by universities that survived. Pony’s is a world that has lost a lot of its population, too, which is the feeling you get in Dawn Wind (though that’s not necessarily the actual historical situation), that the whole of the characters’ known world is in ruins.

I wanted, with Hedge’s and Pony’s travels, to show that their world was recovering, that something new for both humans and vhalgods was growing out of the ruins of the old—a ruin caused in part by their own actions, though the tyranny of the vhalgod emperor was itself a cause of ruin and misery and needed to be ended. Hedge and her brother were among the great captains in the civil war. There’s a background of places run by warlords or terrorized by bandits, of towns and villages that were destroyed in the civil war or have fallen into ruin after in all the chaos—there’s been a long period of lawlessness, banditry, disease, famine, the changing of trade routes. Set against that, however, are places like their own Smithsford, a village that’s grown up around them, because of them; there are also places run by universities that have survived the fall, settlements and single farms where people are making new lives and new communities for themselves, tribes and kingdoms and village councils weaving new networks of trade and mutual support.

Sutcliff created a post-Roman world that hits with a great emotional impact, and that emotion—it’s captured in the Old English poem The Ruin, actually, which is ironic as of course that was written by the people who were the invaders in Dawn Wind—is what coloured my thinking about Pony’s world: a landscape holding the bones of the past, something new growing out of that while the faint memories of the old still wrap around you. Ghedhaynor isn’t meant to be Rome, and Pony’s world isn’t meant to be post-Roman Britain, but if you want to put it in wine-tasting terms, there are underlying hints of Sutcliff’s interpretation of that world in its flavour.

NoaF: Information control and what the characters tell us, or each other, is unusually prominent in this book. What prompted you to make the characters, especially Arrany, so… twisty in that regard?

KVJ: Blame Pony—she’s the twisty one!

Writing a story told in the first person is always a challenge, and for one where it’s being told after the fact and not as a stream of consciousness unfolding as it happens (which can feel a bit artificial because how are you the reader then privy to this flow of thought?), the writer always has to choose what to have the narrator tell and when to have them tell it, and there has to be some justification within the story for what’s revealed and what’s for a time withheld or outright concealed. In Breath and Bone, there’s a framing narrative, an implied audience within the book, the “you” whom Pony is addressing.

You have to remember that everything you learn about Arrany, twisty though she may be, or even Hedge, is coming through Pony. She’s a minstrel, an entertainer. This is very much a story told by a storyteller, so even though she’s casting it into the first person, it’s not some window into her mind; it’s a very carefully controlled narrative shaped to keep her audience listening (and throwing a few coins into that awful squashy hat or buying her another mug of heather beer). She’s creating herself as a character within her own story, which every first-person narrator does, but she’s being very deliberate and open about it, as when she tells you about a very terrible and traumatic thing in her past, “Oh, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to talk about it, but now you need to know so you can understand why I reacted to such-and-such the way I did.” She tells you what she wants you to know when she wants you to know it, and, when telling other people’s parts of the story, she could be telling you what she believed she knew at that time, or what that person wanted at that point to present to the world as their own story, rather than what she may have found out later—unless she has decided it’s important to do otherwise, to give you a forewarning of something because that’s the more dramatic choice. You’re being made a part of the story, a participating part of the audience at that fireside, by her way of telling it; you-that-audience are startled or shocked at an action of hers, so she reveals more about herself than maybe she meant to, in trying to explain it; your anticipation delights her, shapes what she withholds or reveals next. Pony loves a good tale and she loves to tell one. She’s going to keep utter control of her narrative to set you up for the best journey she can give you.

NoaF: The vhalgods and vhalbairns (such wonderful use of language in this book) promise a whole possible host of stories in this landscape. And this novel really does feel thorny in the sense that there are others stories seemingly lurking everywhere in the landscape. Have any other stories niggled at you as you wrote this one?

KVJ: There are definitely more stories in this world. Just thinking of one seems to make others grow out of it, like branches from a vine, climbing and wandering over the map. Of course there are stories in the past, darker stories from the days of Pony’s captivity and the civil war, which she might allude to, but in this time, generations later, just this one story of Pony and Hedge and Jinn travelling south to the mountains with Arrany spun off at least two more in my mind. My Torrie books for children were like that: each was a standalone, but writing each one gave me an idea for another. Pony is very like Torrie in that regard: she goes wandering and tells stories; every story reminds her of another. It’s a format for a series that I think works really well for adult sword and sorcery. There’s so much past in this world and a big map to explore, so many things left mysterious, or broken and only roughly healed, or completely unfinished, after the fall of the empire, that Hedge and Pony can go on wandering through it and tangling themselves up in adventures for some time to come. And of course, as a vhalgod and a wild godling, they have a more than human lifespan to do that in. Breath and Bone is a standalone, but at the end, they're not heading home despite having finished the story off nicely and dealt with all the problems they set out to deal with; they've decided there's something they need to look into south of the mountains. Goodbrother Bessamy back home in Smithsford will have to go on looking after Hedge's flock of laying-ducks for another season.

NoaF: Thank you so much for answering these questions. Where can readers find you and find out more about you? (might as well get this question out of the way now)

KVJ: My website is at https://www.kvj.ca and I’m on Bluesky as @kvjohansen.bsky.social.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

Book review: The Wolf and the Wild King by K. V. Johansen

A high fantasy story of two men caught in the tendrils of justice, invasion, heroism, and dark recurring magic

Mairran is the son of the Dragon Queen, and her bloody agent. Bloody in the sense of covered in blood; an agent of the Queen’s command, Mairran is sent when justice requires the edge of a sword. Or sometimes something less noble than justice... and just the command of his mother the Queen.

Meanwhile, in another time period but in the same area, Lannesk is a bastard son, along with his younger brother Anzimor. Theirs is not an easy life, especially with trouble brewing in the north from dragonkin. His is a story of growing up and surviving in a cold, unforgiving land.

And both Mairran and Lannesk are going to be confronted by a mysterious figure from the forest, one whose power holds fate and secrets for them both. The mysterious and eldritch and titular Wild King.

This is the story of The Wolf and the Wild King by K. V. Johansen.

Johansen’s adult fantasy novels, particularly that of the Caravan series, are full of old gods, demons, devils, and dark magic that is definitely not of the Sandersonian school of comprehensible and documented “scientific magic.” Mysterious beings of power, landscapes evocative, rich and immersive. Complicated wheels within wheels of plots, characters whose motivations and true intentions only slowly reveal themselves. Complex and multi-varied characterizations of protagonists.

The Wolf and the Wild King is no different in this regard.

Our setting is a northern taiga near the coast, but the main feature of the area is an enormous lake, large enough to be a sea with islands. This is a wild and hard country, where winters are long and hard, and growing and warm seasons brief, intense, and all too short, and life is unending toil for anyone from the Queen (or local Earls) on down to the peasants. It’s of a piece with previous novels by Johansen, but this is a land that we haven’t directly seen before in the narrative. The landscape is winningly evoked on the page, and I could almost feel the chill whenever the story turned to winters that even a Minnesotan or Canadian would respect in their ferocity. The lake itself almost feels like a character, the center of a lot of the action and the plot, and we get to see it in multiple seasons as well. It feels like a large Lake Superior, but with an outlet to the ocean, and kingdoms, earldoms, castles, villages, towns and more all huddled around its shore.

It’s no wonder that Mairran, son of the Queen, and Lannesk, a poor bastard son clawing his way through life as best he can, don’t have the most pleasant of lives. There is also a strong and abiding sense of stubborn independence in the people of this land. The Earls chafe under the rule of higher nobles, such as the Queen, which is where Mairran and his justice come into play. The commonfolk are cold and stubborn and often look out for themselves. Lannesk’s life on the road with Anzimor, once they are forced by circumstance, is not an easy one.

One interesting puzzle that pulled me through the narrative was just what was the relationship between Mairran and Lannesk, both as characters and when they were aligned in time and space to each other. Johansen layers her worldbuilding and exposition with rich detail, and I enjoyed the puzzle of picking up the pieces to try and make sense of the narrative. There is a real sense of fantasy history in her novels, a history told in songs and stories rather than tomes, and the contradictions and complications of historical narrative comes across. The characters, especially Lannesk, really inhabit this sort of thinking and mindset.

Another interesting series of choices is in Lannesk’s narrative. Lannesk is a mute, and in fact, aside from a couple of attempts at music, all of his communication, especially with his brother, is nonverbal. In order to accomplish this narratively, Johansen breaks away from the intimate first-person PoV that we get in Mairran (whereby we really get into his head). Instead we get a third-person PoV, and no word or explanation that Lannesk isn’t speaking for some time, something for the reader to discover and then reveal the narrative possibilities of. It’s an excellent use of the craft and techniques of writing to better tell a story. This helps distinguish Lannesk’s story from Mairran’s and gives us an outside perspective on some of the events in the book.

I have not really detailed the meaning of the title, talked about the Wolf or the Wild Man. This is deliberate on my part, since who they really are, and what they are to each other, is another of the mysteries and past narratives unfolding in the book. Suffice it to say that there are a number of powerful immortal beings memorialized in songs and tales by the characters, and they do impinge on the plot itself. To say more would spoil some of the lovely surprises the book has. It’s a rich and well written story that entertained throughout for both narratives.

This does make the subgenre of the book an open question. It’s not quite a full-screen epic fantasy; the fate of the world or the kingdom isn’t quite at stake in either narrative. However, it’s not a narrow book, either. It is a secondary world fantasy, and it can be dark at times (Mairran is not really a hero, and Lannesk is just trying to survive). I don’t think this is quite grimdark, either. It’s brooding, lyrical, dark secondary world fantasy.

One major criticism I have for this story is that it is incomplete. The story is “to be continued” in the second volume, The Raven and the Harper. From a plot point of view, that means the story gives me an air of dissatisfaction, especially considering where Lannesk is left off at the end (Mairran is in a more stable situation, but his mission is far from done). While I do definitely want to read the second volume to find the conclusion of the story, readers who want a complete narrative in one volume will not find it here.

Highlights:

• Strong mythic narrative, with interesting plotting and worldbuilding puzzles
• Excellent use of setting
• Not a complete story in one volume

Reference: Johansen, K. V. The Wolf and the Wild King [Crossroad Press, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin

6 Books With K V Johansen

Originally from Kingston, Ontario, K.V. Johansen has an M.A. in Medieval Studies from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto and another, in English Literature, from McMaster, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. She’s been writing fantasy since childhood and has a lifelong fascination with history, archaeology, trees, and language. She also plays guitar with great determination and dedication, moderate technical skill, and to her enduring regret, an utter lack of musical talent. In addition to her secondary world fantasy for adults, she is the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens, some of which have won awards and various of which have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish. She lives in New Brunswick on the Bay of Fundy and spends too much time on Twitter, @kvjohansen. Her website is at www.kvj.ca.

Today she shares her Six Books with us:

1. What book are you currently reading?

I’m often reading several novels at once in fits and starts, and some non-fiction too -- right now, Timber Castles, by Robert Higham and Philip Barker, and Eric Christiansen’s Northern Crusades. At the top of the fiction stack of things on the go is RJ Barker’s Blood of Assassins, the second in his Wounded Kingdom trilogy. I’d read the first one a while ago, but only picked this one up recently, in part because I couldn’t make my mind up whether I liked the protagonist and narrator Girton, the apprentice assassin, or not. I’m still not sure if I like Girton as a person, but he fascinates me as a character, and I’m still chewing over why I feel as though I’m holding him off at a bit of a distance, emotionally. That’s success, from a writer’s point of view, of a kind (I hope RJ sees it that way!) -- creating someone that people can have a complicated reaction to. There’s some excellent writing in these books. One thing that really impresses me about the series as a whole, from the technical point of view, is the excellent use of the first person; it’s a rich secondary world and story that is very complex in psychology, plot, and politics, which can be difficult to do justice to with a point of view limited to one person, even when the narration provides some historical distance and space for reflection on the part of the narrator. It’s just a great story, too, lots of twists and turns, and beautifully-written.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

There are several. Martha Wells’ Murderbot novel, and K.D. Edwards’ The Hanged Man, are two that are high on my must-read-as-soon-as-available list, but the one I’ve been particularly waiting for a while now is Sidewinders, the sequel to Robert V.S. Redick’s Master Assassins. It’s the story of two brothers, conscript soldiers on the run from a theocratic tyrant, with an complicated family history behind them. One’s a very responsible, serious sort of man; the other’s possibly mad, or possessed, or damaged by something in his past, or just irresponsible and impetuous. Even his brother isn’t certain why he fits into the world so badly. They don’t like each other, but they’re brothers, both feeling they’re bound together by that regardless. The world is an interesting concept -- a continent quarantined by the more technologically-advanced rest of the world because of a deadly disease to which its inhabitants seem to have resistance, but which sends medical missions out to them, kept carefully isolated from any contact with contagion, magic, a theocratic tyrant with some rather horrific forces at her command. By the end of the first book Mektu and Kandri have survived everything sent to destroy them so far, acquired some equally well-developed and interesting companions, and discovered a little more about the mysteries of their world. They’re at that point where you and they can pause, take a breath, and face up to the next onslaught you know is coming. According to Redick’s blog, it is coming, but there’s no date yet.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

Re-reading is interesting. Sometimes it’s just a quiet impulse, or you pick up something because you’d like to enjoy that again or remind yourself of it in some way, but sometimes it’s an intense craving. When it’s the latter, it can be a need to escape into something familiar from some stress or worry or heavy weight on you, but often I find that the thing I felt such an urgent desire to re-read turns out to have something in it that resolves some quandary that I’ve been wrestling with in my current work -- it’ll be something to do with the narrative approach, or how difficulties in a character are set up, or a way of touching the story, that reminds me of what I need to be doing or sparks off something that solves my problem, shines a bit of moonlight on the path I’ve been stumbling in the dark to find. It’s like some underlayer of my brain knows what’s missing or where I’ve gone wrong in the WiP but doesn’t have any words of its own, so it points me at something that will show it to me. I’ve had that experience with LeCarré and Bujold, though most often it will be Diana Wynne Jones or Cherryh. The thing I most recently had an intense desire to reread was McKillip’s Kingfisher, which I’ve read a couple of times, but this time I bought the audiobook because I felt like I needed to have it read to me. Aside from the sheer enjoyment of the work, which is one of her best, what I’m taking from it on this re-read is a reminder of her lightness of touch, something I’m trying to achieve in my current project.

4. How about a book you’ve changed your mind about -- either positively or negatively?

How about a series? Discworld! (I hang my head in shame ...) The thing is, when I was a teen, people kept telling me, oh you like fantasy and science fiction, you’ll like/the bookseller said you’ll like X, and I always hated X because it was always appallingly poorly written, clunky, bad imitations of Tolkien by (usually) Americans utterly tone-deaf in language, writing plots about swaggering teen boys (even if they were ostensibly adults) in which girls were barmaids and prostitutes and rape-victims and prizes. So all that, “Oh you like fantasy so you should read Boy On Quest” stuff that older people kept pushing at me was just trash and I stopped even trying it. And since it was so hard to find the kind of fantasy I was hungry for, I had no patience with the shallow it’s-all-a-game stuff, though I did stick with Aspirin’s Myth for a few books. No stomach for cotton-candy when I was having such a hard time finding proper bread. With a few exceptions -- Bellairs, Blaylock, Cherryh, Cook, McKillip -- when it came to adult fantasy I mostly trusted British writers, when I could find them, and the British publishers tended to have quite distinctive art -- either landscapey, or Robert Gould. And there was Pratchett, and those covers, either original Corgis or the even worse (because not even good art) Roc editions, said to me, “Hey, we know this is not a real story but just a silly game.” So I dismissed it on sight as just another shallow spoof, or worse, another bad Tolkien imitator who was going to be a waste of my five dollars. (Why did I not open it up and read a few pages? I do not know. My friends and I could all quote numerous passages of Hitchhiker’s; we’d have loved Pratchett if only one of us had bought one back in 1985.)

And then many years later, I picked up a copy of Johnny and the Bomb that my sister was reading. I read it in one go, and then I started it again. Then I went into town, to the used bookstore (there wasn’t a new book store in that place), and by some miracle they had Guards! Guards! and Maskerade. So that was that. I wonder if I’d have bounced off the Discworld again if all I’d found was The Colour of Magic? I think not, because having read Johnny, I knew Pratchett could write, and write a story that felt real and true at the story level even in the moments when it was being utter farce, and that was the most important thing. But I am very glad that the two I did find to take me into the Discworld at last were from the start of the apogee.

Moral: don’t judge a book by its cover. Really. Don’t do that.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

I’m torn as to whether to answer The Lord of the Rings or The Lantern Bearers. The Lord of the Rings is the obvious answer for many reasons: poetic prose, the sheer range of tone, of diction that changes to suit character and mood and mode, landscape you can see and feel and smell, layer upon layer of history sinking back into a legendary past, languages and trees and archaeology pushing through. The slow-gathering doom. The need for individuals to take heroism upon themselves, the importance of finding wonder and delight in the world. I read it repeatedly one winter when I was eight and it’s the one book that has shaped me in so many ways -- it sank language into my bones. But another profound and lasting influence is Rosemary Sutcliff, in particular her books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, strong characters, dark but hopeful, with light always breaking through, beautiful writing and such a sense of place, or the more grim Mark of the Horse Lord and Song for a Dark Queen. I think the tone and mood of Sutcliff at her darkest leaks through into The Last Road more than I realized, now that I look back over it.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

My latest book is The Last Road. It’s the fifth and final book of Gods of the Caravan Road, which is secondary world epic fantasy, silk road fantasy. Why is it awesome? Most of the main characters, the no-longer human ones, from the earlier four books (and the short story “The Storyteller”, which is the very beginning of it all), are still around, and come together in this, because a threat against all the gods that has been quietly simmering underneath everything else that was going on right from Blackdog has burst out of the shadows and is sweeping east across the world, destroying people and their societies and their gods as it comes. The mood of The Last Road is darker than what’s gone before. Hope seems harder to come by. But finally, we get to see Moth and Yeh-Lin together, which I’ve been wanting to do for several books now. It turned out not to be the scene I had in my mind, involving them hanging out drinking wine in a tavern which looked suspiciously like the place where Navarre acquires Philippe in Ladyhawke, but something with less wine and sunshine, and rather bloodier. (Yes, rather bloodier even than that.) And of course, Moth being Moth . . . and very, very angry in this book . . . things will burn.


POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.