For Game of Thrones fans looking to pass the time between the releases of A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons, Durham offered the Acacia trilogy. Book One: The War With the Mein** is itself broken into three parts which are, unfortunately, called "books" so that at the start of the story you are reading Acacia, Book One: The War With the Mein, Book One: The King's Idyll. That's on the publisher; shame on you, Doubleday.
Book One of Book One is about King NedLeto Starktreides, who is prescient enough to know that it's wrong to allow the Spacing Guild to push melange on the population of the Seven Kingdoms, but does not have the wherewithal to stop it. Worse, Sting is leading the wildlings south to avenge their banishment 22 generations ago, and they're bringing the mummified corpses of all their ancestors with them***, along with an army of cannibal giants riding woolly rhinos (who, for their part, had been banished to the Icy North**** by the Enemies Who Will Be Appearing Later in the Trilogy). Maybe the Starktreides should have built a Wall to keep the wildlings out!
Book Two of Book One follows NedLeto's four amazing children as they scatter to the four winds:
- RobBran, the eldest, communes with spirits and raises an army to avenge his father;
- Sansa, the elder sister, is a bit of a wet blanket and spends her time as a captive of the family's enemies, but eventually proves to be more capable than we are originally led to believe;
- Arya, the younger sister, becomes a badass with a sword, a killer without remorse;
- Rickon, the youngest, goes off to be the Dread Pirate Roberts
Book Three concludes Book One, and sees NedLeto's children work together to end the war with the Mein. I don't want to write any major spoilers, but there was something here that jerked me out of the story in this stage. Durham has been a feminist, introducing us to female soldiers as a matter of course in chapter 3. However, when it comes to the succession and the children discuss what should be done if, Giver forbid, something should happen to RobBran, it seems to be assumed that Rickon will become King, with no thought at all for Sansa or Arya. That flies in the barbaric Westeros, but feels totally out of place here.
All in all, a good read that starts well (I really liked the early chapters from Leodan's and Thaddeus's POVs -- there's a description of Thaddeus with his cat that's my favorite passage in the whole book; some darlings shouldn't be killed), gets a little lost and muddled for a while (many of the battle sequences feel trivialized, with one side or the other easily swept aside. Durham's strengths lie elsewhere), finds its stride again and ultimately satisfactorily wraps up this part of the story while setting up the next installment in the trilogy. Would definitely recommend to GoT readers.
** so in the German translation, it could be called "Mein Kampf"?! And is this funnier because the Mein are tall, severe, blue-eyed blondes?
*** I was really confused by whose ancestors constituted the Tunishnevre (which keeps getting rearranged in my head as "tushie nerve"). Was it just Hanish Mein's relatives, or the entire Mein nobility, or everyone who ever lived in Tahalian? Just Hanish's relatives doesn't seem like it would require the grand undertaking to move them described in the book, but everyone who had lived in Tahalian seems like too many, so I'm guessing door #2, but this really isn't something that I should have to guess at.
**** I'd like to see more fantasies set in a southern hemisphere where enemies come out of the frozen south
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