Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kelseythefancyhatladyreads 's review for:
The Mountain of Kept Memory
by Rachel Neumeier
This was a pleasant surprise for me! It's a new release that I haven't seen getting much attention at all here at the end of 2016/beginning of 2017.
The narrative switches between two protagonists, Gulien and Oressa, prince and princess of Carastind. The plot is instigated by an invasion of the capital city of Carastind by a foreign prince, but that is just the start. It's a wild ride of shifting situations and allegiances (well, wild by my standards; I like my fantasy pretty tame) that kept me on my toes guessing from start to finish!
It's all to do with the Kieba, an immortal woman believed to be a former goddess, and the use of her magic, the remnants of the magic of the dead gods. She dwells inside a mountain in Carastind, and the kingdom has always relied upon her protection, but now they can no longer be certain of it. And it turns out that various factions have very different ideas about what and who the Kieba really is, how her magic works, and how it might be exploited.
And this is where The Mountain of Kept Memory rubs up against the border between fantasy and sci-fi, because elements of the Kieba's "magic," when seen in action, look a quite a bit like far-future SF technology. So this could be a far-future regressed society, or a fantasy world that happens to have had an incredibly high-tech past. The ambiguities in the worldbuilding appealed to me, and I liked that Neumeier refrained from giving us clear-cut answers.
But what I honestly enjoyed the most about Neumeier's writing was how intelligent all of the characters evidently are (and all differently so), without her ever having to TELL us how intelligent they are. The plot is driven by the ways the protagonists (and antagonists) interpret constantly-changing situations and decide upon courses of action accordingly.
There are quite a few comments here on the promotional comparison to [a:Robin McKinley|5339|Robin McKinley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1314406026p2/5339.jpg] and [a:Guy Gavriel Kay|60177|Guy Gavriel Kay|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1218804723p2/60177.jpg]. I'm a huge fan of McKinley, and though I have never read anything by Kay, I wouldn't have thought of lumping those two authors together. Though McKinley's books are often quite different from each other, the element of ambiguity and complexity in Neumeier's writing reminded me a bit of hers. If you're going to compare Mountain of Kept Memory to a McKinley book, I'd say that [b:Pegasus|7507951|Pegasus (Pegasus, #1)|Robin McKinley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1265406037s/7507951.jpg|7147745] is the one to compare it to (though Mountain of Kept Memory stands alone, as Pegasus does not).
The narrative switches between two protagonists, Gulien and Oressa, prince and princess of Carastind. The plot is instigated by an invasion of the capital city of Carastind by a foreign prince, but that is just the start. It's a wild ride of shifting situations and allegiances (well, wild by my standards; I like my fantasy pretty tame) that kept me on my toes guessing from start to finish!
It's all to do with the Kieba, an immortal woman believed to be a former goddess, and the use of her magic, the remnants of the magic of the dead gods. She dwells inside a mountain in Carastind, and the kingdom has always relied upon her protection, but now they can no longer be certain of it. And it turns out that various factions have very different ideas about what and who the Kieba really is, how her magic works, and how it might be exploited.
And this is where The Mountain of Kept Memory rubs up against the border between fantasy and sci-fi, because elements of the Kieba's "magic," when seen in action, look a quite a bit like far-future SF technology. So this could be a far-future regressed society, or a fantasy world that happens to have had an incredibly high-tech past. The ambiguities in the worldbuilding appealed to me, and I liked that Neumeier refrained from giving us clear-cut answers.
But what I honestly enjoyed the most about Neumeier's writing was how intelligent all of the characters evidently are (and all differently so), without her ever having to TELL us how intelligent they are. The plot is driven by the ways the protagonists (and antagonists) interpret constantly-changing situations and decide upon courses of action accordingly.
There are quite a few comments here on the promotional comparison to [a:Robin McKinley|5339|Robin McKinley|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1314406026p2/5339.jpg] and [a:Guy Gavriel Kay|60177|Guy Gavriel Kay|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1218804723p2/60177.jpg]. I'm a huge fan of McKinley, and though I have never read anything by Kay, I wouldn't have thought of lumping those two authors together. Though McKinley's books are often quite different from each other, the element of ambiguity and complexity in Neumeier's writing reminded me a bit of hers. If you're going to compare Mountain of Kept Memory to a McKinley book, I'd say that [b:Pegasus|7507951|Pegasus (Pegasus, #1)|Robin McKinley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1265406037s/7507951.jpg|7147745] is the one to compare it to (though Mountain of Kept Memory stands alone, as Pegasus does not).