The Scroll of Years
A Gaunt and Bone Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
It's Brent Weeks meets China Mieville in this wildly imaginative fantasy debut featuring high action, elegant writing, and sword and sorcery with a Chinese flare. Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone are a romantic couple and partners in crime. Persimmon is a poet from a well-to-do family, who found herself looking for adventure, while Imago is a thief in his ninth decade who is double-cursed, and his body has not aged in nearly seventy years. Together, their services and wanderlust have taken them into places better left unseen, and against odds best not spoken about. Now, they find themselves looking to get away, to the edge of the world, with Persimmon pregnant with their child, and the most feared duo of assassins hot on their trail. However, all is never what it seems, and a sordid adventure--complete with magic scrolls, gangs of thieves, and dragons both eastern and western--is at hand.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At its best, Willrich's beautifully written debut paints a vivid, richly imagined world populated by delightfully memorable characters; at its worst, it serves as a disturbing case study in Orientalism. Persimmon Gaunt and Imago Bone, an adventure-seeking couple, are on the run from the Night's Auditors, assassins who leave their victims in a vegetative state, and an arkendrake, a fire-breathing Western dragon. They flee to the wuxia-inspired Qiangguo, an empire bounded by the Heavenwalls and suffocating under its strict adherence to tradition and convention. There, aided by resourceful Swan priestess Eshe, rebellious young bandit Next-One-A-Boy, and Wulin warrior and mother Lightning Bug, they encounter murderous bandits, imperial officials, transspatial dislocation scrolls, and an unexpected prophesied destiny for them and their unborn child. This fantastical quest story contains witty narration, well-drawn characters, and a fast-moving plot, but its portrayal of Qiangguo as stagnating in isolation and desperately in need of outside saviors will put off some readers, especially those familiar with Chinese history and culture.
