You never want to ruin a really good dramatic exit. When you flee home on a cyborg horse the exact second you turn eighteen, you don’t really expect to go back to the place you fled from, you know? But sometimes your old life hits you from behind.
Sometimes you spend years away from home, killing dangerous people who had the bad luck to get infected by a lungful of ghostfog, only to find out that your dad, the king, is dead, and now your siblings are ordering you back home for a high stakes family reunion.
But when the heirs are quadruplets, the line of succession tends to get a wee bit murky. So in order to regain your independence, you’ve got to navigate a deadly web of intrigue, where every sibling wants your allegiance, and any decision might tear your country—and your family—apart.
This book is absolutely wild, an endearing but also somewhat self destructive main protagonist, a messed up family dynamic that’s complex and fraught with tension, fog made of ghosts, cyborg horses, political machinations and cyborg horses. Yes I said cyborg horses twice, deal with it. They’re crazy and fantastic.
The world building in this book is some the strangest but also fascinating I’ve seen in awhile. I mean, it’s not often you come across swords with a built-in human thyroid. Actually I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. I’d remember it. There’s this mix of machine parts and organs to everything in a world that is two disasters in the hole.
On top of it though, the character dynamics are full of drama particularly in the Mercy family amongst the quadruplets and then there’s their mother but she’s her own piece of work. They make for such engaging characters as the siblings are forced to work, or not work, through the years of trauma in their family amidst a brewing civil war. It’s enthralling stuff.
I cannot wait to get my hands on the next book.
C.M. Caplan
C.M. Caplan is the author of the SPFBO7 semi-finalist The Sword in the Street, and the post-apocalyptic science-fantasy The Fall Is All There Is. He’s a quadruplet (yes, really), autistic, and has a degree in creative writing. He was awarded his university’s highest honor in the arts for his work. His short fiction also won an Honorable Mention in the 2019 Writers of the Future Contest. If you enjoy his books, you can rate them on Goodreads and Amazon.
