The King's Blood - DO NOT READ!
by
Sabrina Zbasnik
If, like some poor souls across the world, you suffer from a prevailing lack of imagination, if you expect your cereal to stay crunchy even in milk, if you -- in fact -- have no whimsy, then you will despise this book. Being a fantasy tale and all, it should not come as a surprise that there is very little discussion of the preferred architectural structure of housing in the late Roman Empire. Rarely do characters insist that their underlings get the nuclear launch codes or have inner monologues about the fall of a plastic bag. Even a few fantastical creatures pop in to say ‘hi’ on occasion.
You will despise my book and probably want to set fire to it if you think of the world in one, maybe two shades. I prefer to work in all the greys of the rainbow. Is the villain truly evil? He is following orders he doesn’t agree with, but he’s also trying to preserve as much life as he can even if it means he has to kill to do it. Are the protagonists really good? Is relying upon a prophecy to determine your destiny ever a wise move or are you moving into self-fulfilling territory? Where have all the cowboys gone?
If you think that all medieval fantasy should be lily white where the girls wait around in towers and the boys do all the fun sword fighting this is not the book for you. Media’s done its best to convince us that everyone in Europe prior to the 19th century was so white they were almost see through, but that is nowhere near accurate. The King’s Blood injects some much needed color into the sword & sorcery genre with Ciara, the main heroine, as she struggles to get a teenage idiot’s butt on the throne. Along the way, she encounters Taban, whose skin is even darker than hers; and Isa, an Asian witch not about to take crap from anyone.
Expecting 80 pages of the history of some world that only exists inside one person’s head and then another 30 on the preferred imports from surrounding countries and their choice of symbols on the flag? Then you really will not like my book. There are very few songs about the joys of bathing, no treatises on the drapery highlighting a noble lady’s figure, and the exquisite buttresses of the crumbling castles continue to be unadmired. The vast uses of the iron smithed expertly into a plow are left unheeded in favor of another five or seven fight scenes and a dozen jokes about the frailty of life.
Take your medieval fantasy as serious as your bourbon? Abandon all hope, ye who read here. For as you hopefully determined from this article, my tales of crossing and double crossing an empire, of struggling to find a place in a world on the brink of destruction, of assassins and witches and priests, are to be taken lightly. I see no reason to take life seriously, it’s not as if we’re gonna get out of it alive. Unless the zombocalypse occurs, then I call “zombie-run-over-by-old-fashioned-carriage.”
If, despite all these warnings I scrawled across your door, you still want to read The King’s Blood, you can find it here. But don’t say I didn’t…eh, you get the picture.
| Author Sabrina Zbasnik taking size zero a little too far! Nice hairdo though. |
S. E. Zbasnik has a degree in genetics, which means there may or may not be a horde of monkeoctopi doing her bidding to take over the world. Bringing that scientific approach to the fantasy world is her game, trying to put some common sense into magic and magic into common sense.
You can find here flitting about on twitter as @introvertedwife or on the book of face, trying to seal in a demon or two.
Magic is coming back. Or so say the old prophesies cobbled together from wandering soothsayers, women huffing broken gas lines, and the back of comic tomes. The Evil Empire™ of Avar and its perfectly sane, in no way crazy Emperor risks others' life and limb to stop it from coming to pass.
The only obstinate chunk of gravel in their shoes is a small kingdom warring against the over confident reach of the growing Empire. The fight was going well for them, all things considered, right until their King went and let his head slip right off his shoulders.
Now Ciara, a black servant into her sixteenth year, finds herself on a mad quest across the countryside trying to get the second son and possibly only hope of the severed Ostero line back onto his throne. Along the way, she and Aldrin — the rather simple and OH GODS KEEP HIM AWAY FROM ANYTHING SHARP prince — find themselves at the mercy of assassins, witches, traveling historians, a sect of killer doctors, and the unblinkers.
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