Strange Horizons review of James Logan’s The Silverblood Promise

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The Silverblood Promise cover (a man and a child stand atop a steeply slanted roof, staring out at a sprawling medieval cityscape)
(Cover Artist: Jeff Brown)
A review I wrote of James Logan's novel The Silverblood Promise is currently up in the most recent issue of Strange Horizons. This book is the first installment in Logan's The Last Legacy fantasy trilogy, and follows a character named Lukan Gardova, who is seeking to unravel a mystery surrounding his father's death.

Personally, my opinion of this story was a little bit mixed. I felt that the author's premise had a lot of potential, with the core plot kicking off when Lukan is visited by his family's steward--a woman who gives him a letter which his father seems to have written in his final moments. This letter appears to command that Lukan voyage to a distant city called Saphrona--presumably so as to avenge his father's death. The surface-level mystery surrounding why Lukan's father wrote him this message, at least initially, is supplemented with a deeper storyline revolving around a lingering resentment that Lukan still harbors towards his parent. An excerpt from the review is below:

As the novel begins, Lukan is living what he views as a life of poverty. Having once been a low-ranking aristocrat in the nation of Parva, Lukan has been disowned by his father, Conrad Gardova, after being expelled from the academy where he’d been studying. His offense had been to kill his opponent during a state-sanctioned duel. Outraged that his son had tarnished the Gardova family’s reputation, Lukan’s father cut all ties with his son, pointedly ignoring the fact that many witnesses to the duel reported that Lukan’s opponent—a much wealthier classmate—had actually attacked him after the match had officially ended, and that Lukan had therefore acted in self-defense.

Unfortunately, while I felt that this setup had a lot of potential, the interplay between the mystery regarding Lukan's father and Lukan's own fraught emotions towards his parent vanish fairly quickly as the story develops. In the place of these narratives, the book instead becomes a simple step-by-step description of the literal events comprising Lukan's adventures in Saphrona, with the novel gradually transforming itself into a shallow celebration of the sense of purpose and meaning that Lukan finds as a result of embarking on this stereotypically mythic quest. This, despite the fact that as the story continues, the emotions motivating Lukan seem to grow increasingly toxic in a way which the book doesn't address.

That said, like I wrote in the review, there are some indications by this novel's ending that future installments in this series might be less singularly focused on Lukan, and may introduce a broader cast of characters who could balance out the narrative with their own motivations and ambitions.

The full review which I wrote for Strange Horizons can be read here on their site.

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