Book Review: A Shadow in Summer

Title: A Shadow in Summer
Author: Daniel Abraham
Reviewed Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 356
Rating: 4 Stars


Review: As far as I know this is Daniel Abraham's first full novel.  It's beginning to seem a regular thing but as usual, Dusty put me onto this one.  I'm pretty sure he found out about it because George R.R. Martin (GRRM hereafter) is a big fan of this new author and mentioned it somewhere (as the book itself can be a little hard to find in a book store and is not particularly well known)... And as GRRM is my pretty much my favorite author in any genre I thought it would make good sense to give it a go.  Incidentally, Abraham is a graduate of the prestigious Clarion Workshop, a writing school for fantasy, sci-fi, and horror writers, that Dusty was just invited too-- and which GRRM will be an instructor at.

A Shadow in Summer (first book in a four-volume series Abraham calls The Long Price Quartet) is a fantasy novel set in a world that Abraham created, that to his credit, is very original in a lot of ways.  I would say it has something of an "Asian" (incidentally, I abhor the generalized Asian concept-- it's every bit as accurate as taking all peoples and cultures in North and South America and calling them "American" and treating them as some sort of monolithic and closely related bloc) feel to it.  The author never identifies it as so, it's just something about the clothes they wear and the distinctly Chinese feeling bureaucracy to the social constructs he used that left me with that feeling.  That said, the political structure is his own creation, and without any obvious correlated Earth nation.  He's also constructed a very unique magic concept for his world. 


To set the stage, without trying to give too much of the plot away, the story follows a handful of significant characters through an intrigue that occurs at court in the novel's setting, a city called Saraykhet, which is a part of a kind of confederation of kingdoms or city-states called The Khaiem.  The story did start off with one of those sorts of passages that won't be explained for some time, which made for a slow start but a nice little a-ha later.  The setting at the beginning appears to be a very harsh school for young men who are in some way gifted, although I was unsure for a while just what they were gifted in...  As you might expect the school is for the selection of future users of the magical concept that Abraham has designed.  Magic, such as it is in this world, involves a "Poet" using language to capture/create a god, called an andat, who is the perfect embodiment of some abstract concept.  Once an andat has been so captured then the Poet can direct it to carry out practical tasks related to the abstract concept it represents.  This gives the Khaiem great power in the world, and it seems each of their great cities is built around (at least) one such andat.


The plot itself is interesting and well constructed and has a bit of everything: some action, intrigue, love, and strong characterization.  Abraham, I think, is very strongly influenced by GRRM and it shows.  Much like a GRRM offering, the novel tends to read itself with generally clear prose and good dialogue... And Abraham even uses a few phrases here and there that any GRRM reader would recognize right off.  Best lesson Abraham may have gotten from GRRM though, has been character development and the use of dynamic three-dimensional characters.  This book offers a number of very interesting characters who all experience change in their situations and in themselves and that is what made this book such a joy to read. 


If you're a fan of fantasy books, or if you'd like to give the genre a try with something engaging, accessible, and solid, I very highly recommend A Shadow in Summer.  I'm looking forward to picking up the next book in the series, A Betrayal in Winter, and seeing which of the characters from the first novel Abraham brings forward and what awaits them.  (4 stars)