Blood Ties: Book One of the Castings Trilogy (Pamela Freeman, Hachette Livre Australia, $24.95 tpb, ISBN 9780733622113, September) ***

Pamela Freeman has made her name as a children’s author; Blood Ties marks her entry into adult epic fantasy. And it is epic, in its themes (necromancy, revenge, heritage) and in its expanse across time and space. Two things lift it out of the ordinary run of large-scale quest novels, however: the intriguing role played by ghosts, and the careful humanity of the characters. The book will probably appeal to fans of Robin Hobb, as like Hobb’s books it is a work on a large canvas rounded in the individual stories of dozens of characters, some likeable and some deeply unlikeable, but all understandable. The danger is that by spreading the reader’s sympathy so broadly, there is less to spare for the central protagonists. While most readers will probably invest themselves in Ash, the gypsy (or Traveller) boy who apprentices in the city, learning to protect and to kill—and perhaps to lose himself irrevocably, if destiny doesn’t pull him away—it was more difficult for me to remember to care about Bramble, the wild village girl who takes to the road and is drawn to her own destiny, entangled with Ash’s and with the safety of everybody in the Eleven Domains.
Jarrah Moore works for Global Books in Print at Thorpe-Bowker

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker