"Irons in the Fire" Review at Strange Horizons

There's a wonderful review of Irons in the Fire, Juliet McKenna's latest and greatest epic fantasy novel:

One of the great pleasures of Juliet McKenna's novels—to date, the five-volume Tales of Einarinn (1999-2002) and the Aldabreshin Compass quartet (2003-2006)—is the sense that they are set in a pre-modern world not simply because that is how genre fantasy is done, but because the author has a very clear understanding of how a pre-modern world works, and has stories to tell that (with a magical twist) emerge from it naturally. Characters and nations, institutions and trade routes, folklore and theatre productions: all are expressions of the societies and cultures around them, which in turn are born of a complex, dynamic past. This is fantasy, in other words, with a strong sense of both place and history, one in which the world emerges from the lived experience of its varied characters, rather than grand vistas of description.

Irons in the Fire, the first in a new series from a new publisher for McKenna, is a typically rich, robust and unsentimental effort, which sees revolution brewing in Einarinn.

Read more at Strange Horizons.