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A review by stephenmeansme
The Birthgrave by Tanith Lee
4.0
THE BIRTHGRAVE starts with a heck of an image: a pale goddess awakening in the heart of an erupting volcano. Our nameless protagonist wanders the world on a quest for some mysterious Jade, hounded by the curse of the evil fire calling itself Karrakaz. She becomes a village deity; a bandit queen, hippodrome champion, warlord's figurehead, prisoner, slave, feral... she is Imma, Uastis, Morna... It's quite an odyssey. Lee's prose is creative but doesn't feel as dated as some of the other "experimental" / "new wave" sf novels of the Seventies. The sequence in the city of Ankurum, involving a deadly chariot race, was particularly compelling.
It doesn't get 5 stars, mostly because it's just a bit overlong, and the ending is an amazingly literal dea ex machina - a development that, while fitting the protagonist's character development and not entirely unanticipated, doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the worldbuilding department.
Still, Lee was a prolific author and I have several more of her books on my shelf already; I look forward to diving deeper into her bibliography.
It doesn't get 5 stars, mostly because it's just a bit overlong, and the ending is an amazingly literal dea ex machina - a development that, while fitting the protagonist's character development and not entirely unanticipated, doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the worldbuilding department.
Still, Lee was a prolific author and I have several more of her books on my shelf already; I look forward to diving deeper into her bibliography.