Review: Green & Deadly Things

Green & Deadly Things by Jenn Lyons
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jenn Lyons has written the typical sprawling epic fantasy series (A Chorus of Dragons, consisting of five chunky brickbat volumes) but her two recent books, The Sky on Fire and this one, are self-contained stand-alones. To be sure, a five-volume series can be a good thing if it's written well enough and you can get into it, but at least where this author is concerned, I prefer books like these.

If The Sky on Fire offered a nicely unique twist on dragons, this one tackles the legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien's Ents. The title Green and Deadly Things refers to sapient plants and walking tree queens, all tied into the person of the protagonist, Novitiate Mathaiik Haven. Math is a junior member of the Idallik Knights, long after he should have manifested his own magical weapon and joined the Knights as a full-fledged member. The Knights are modern-day guardians against the legacy of the ancient "grim lords," undead wizards who centuries ago nearly destroyed the world.

The story begins with a prologue of a stupid, arrogant bureaucrat who inadvertently awakens the main antagonists, the three Tree Queens, who proceed to lay waste to a logging company's fortress. Math is sent out with a group of Knights to investigate, and stumbles upon a conspiracy that reaches a thousand years into the past and the highest levels of his country Rokasmaa's government. Along the way he accidentally awakens one of the so-called grim lords, the sorceress Kaiataris, and discovers that nearly everything he has been taught about the past and the grim lords' legacy isn't true. He also realizes that he is what Kaiataris--or Kai, as he comes to call her--calls a "wild mage," and he is not the bumbling hanger-on the Idallik Knights always considered him to be, not at all.

The real pleasure in this book is the worldbuilding and the well-thought-out magic system, and how the past reaches its flowery, leafy tendrils into the present. Along the way, Kai and Math overcome their mutual distrust and fall in love, in a nicely paced slow-burn romance (much the kind I prefer). At the climax, Math confronts the final surviving tree Queen, and realizes that as with so many other things about his world, she is not the monster everyone thought she was. In fact, she enables him to defeat Sanistral, the sorcerer who has been manipulating things behind the scenes for quite some time. Sanistral was preparing an invasion of Rokasmaa, until he is stopped by the Queen, Math and Kai. In the process, Math has to take on the mantle of the Queen and become one of the tree people, the Parnathi, and ends up very nearly a god himself. But one can see that due to his own self-effacing nature and his relationship with Kai, he will hopefully avoid the arrogance and hubris that brought the grim lord Sanistral down.

I hope the author keeps this tradition of standalone stories, as they are quite satisfying. I think I can handle chunky books if they're one-and-done. I handled this one, at any rate, and you probably will too, if you give it a try.

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