Amazon Review
There is always a worrying extent to which first fantasy novels, and especially first fantasy trilogies, are liable to consist of the same old ideas more or less meaningfully arranged. Sarah Douglass, in her first novel Battleaxe and this sequel, has not entirely escaped these charges, yet manages largely to evade them by a colourful pictorial imagination and moral underpinning that makes much of what she deals with new and fresh. Caught up in prophesies, Axis struggles politically with his human half-brother, King Borneheld, and magically with his other half-brother, the ambitious chimera Gorgrael, whose legions of monsters squirm South through the snow. He has not only to do the right thing, but do it in the right way, or, says prophecy, all will crumble in his grasp. Torn between his love for two magically gifted women, and between the urge to do what is right and the need to comply with destiny, Axis is an interesting flawed hero, whose dilemmas matter both as those of a convincing character and as those implicit in the sort of book this is. Douglass shows real promise, and even these first books deliver the goods. --Roz Kaveney