Rotherweird: Rotherweird Book I

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I would recommend this book to people who enjoyed the first two books in the series, Rotherweirdand Wyntertide, as it is too intricately-scripted to work as a stand-alone. A twisted, arcane murder-mystery with shades of Hope Mirrlees, Ben Aaronovitch, Mervyn Peake and Edward Gorey at their disturbing best. Compared to the other books that are up there on my favourites shelve, this one made the cut because of very different reasons than the others. The Rotherweird trilogy stands out because it’s quirky, it has the most amazing cast of characters and it takes place in mysterious and enchanting surroundings. The one aspect that really took the cake from those is the characters. As we read on we get introduced to more inhabitants of Rotherweird and some of the countrysiders who live outside of the town’s walls. They all have their quirks and specific personality traits, but the author makes it really easy to connect with each and every one of them. Books that deal with a lot of characters can sometimes become confusing and although Rotherweird teetered on the edge of confusion sometimes, switching viewpoints from paragraph to paragraph, it didn’t bother me at all. On the contrary, to me this gave the book a sort of cinematic feel: jumping across town to our different characters and getting a glimpse of what they’re doing or thinking at that time. It highlighted the contrast of the different characters and made it all feel very real.

However, whilst it is not perfect, I did enjoy Rotherweird enough to launch straight into Wyntertyde once I had finished it! Which also says something about the post-Christmas reading slump in which I often find myself in January. The third book, LostAcre, is apparently due to be released in May 2019 and, yes, I will be keeping an eye out for it. Now I know most of the characters. Nestedness is woven into the book’s fabric in an almost Escherian way, evoking Tudor astrolabes, or diagrams of atomic structures. Secrets reveal secrets reveal secrets. Rotherweird, a hidden world, is full of buildings themselves hiding false ceilings and mysterious compartments. Crucially, it is a gateway to an even more hidden domain – Lost Acre – accessed by lodestones and populated by chimeric monstrosities. In turn, Lost Acre guards its own secret nucleus, a patch of “slippery sky” – a quantum, alchemical wormhole which wreaks havoc or miracles, depending on who’s using it.

Because I basically binged all three books in the Rotherweird Trilogy last month I decided to review all three of them together. I will however try my best to keep it spoiler free so you can read this review even if you haven’t read any of the books yet. As you might be able to tell from the very first sentence of this review, I absolutely loved these books. I couldn’t stop reading and just had to find out what happened next. It’s very rare for me to read a series one book after the other as I usually get a bit of series fatigue and have to slot in another book to cleanse the palate a little bit. Not with Rotherweird! I never got bored and never even thought about putting the series down for another book. Find sources: "Andrew Caldecott"barrister– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( March 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Twelve children, gifted far beyond their years, are banished by their Tudor queen to the town of Rotherweird. Some say they are the golden generation; some say the devil's spawn. But everyone knows they are something to be revered - and feared.

The pace of the novel also seemed a little … off. Especially in the first novel: the climax, which should have been iconic and dramatic as a range of plot threads wound together, just seemed a little rushed. A little brief. With an overly convenient invention dropped into the laps of the main characters. The company of quirky heroes are all rather passive: their most significant skills appear not to be combat or strategy but rather anagrams and crossword solving! The second book was more rounded, giving the female characters a little more space, and evened out the pace a little bit more – as well as (apparently) killing off a number of significant characters. There is something rather familiar within this strange concept. At times Lost Acre almost felt Edenic, especially as the various cages were hoisted into the mixing point by means of a handy tree. A tree of knowledge of good and evil, maybe. Above all, the novel is a lodestone to its own Lost Acre: Englishness. Echoes of Shakespeare's John of Gaunt and Tolkien's Shire, both written during conflict, ring through gardener Hayman Salt's lovely paeon to a bluebell wood: "This was old, forgotten England". But which England is Salt talking about? The hub of innovation and artistry that birthed "the educated Elizabethan mind" which so delights Rotherweird's beguiling ninja-physicist, Vixen Valourhand? Or a post-Brexit isolation chamber, perched on the edge of a new doom? Perils of whimsyIn its fantastical logic, Rotherweird is always coherent, but how it speaks to the non-fantastical is often sublime. It understands history and the perils of historical amnesia. While arguing for science, it delicately distils the ethical quandaries of tinkering with Nature, summoning the spectres of agribusiness, GM foods, deforestation and species extinction with allusive, devastating simplicity: "They do many things to living things."