Reblogged from babbitman:

Diana Wallace Peach has just released her latest series (The Shattered Sea) which made me feel guilty that she’d managed to produce another couple of books while I was still failing to crack on and talk about her previous epic. I’ve been meaning to write a comprehensive review of the Rose Shield tetralogy (one more than a trilogy, in case you were wondering) for ages but things kept getting in the way, not least the amount of time it took to read them in the first place; this is a substantial story (over 1200 pages in total) but I promise you that there’s no padding. I was tempted to frame it in the context of one young girl’s rise from poverty and disfigurement to Power and Influence but it’s much more than that. It’s set in a world on a knife-edge that’s about to undergo a series of changes both internally and externally with questions of succession, invasion, occupation, injustice and revolution. And it’s into this maelstrom of competing interests that Catling is thrown.

We first meet our heroine as a toddler on Darkest Night at the water’s edge; her self-interested mother is attempting to file away the child’s facial birthmark but there are other powers at work. A ghostly presence induces a half-blood river worker to submerge the wounded child into the luminescent water – and that’s where the magic begins to happen.

Continue reading at babbitman