Tremontaine: The Complete Season 3

Tremontaine #3.1-3.13

by Ellen Kushner, Joel Derfner, Tessa Gratton

Welcome to Tremontaine, where ambition, love affairs, and rivalries dance with deadly results. In this novel Ellen Kushner and a team of writers return readers to the world of scandal and swordplay introduced in her cult-classic novel Swordspoint. Readers familiar with the series will find a welcome homecoming while new fans will learn what makes Riverside a place they will want to visit again and again. Tremontaine follows Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, whose beauty is matched only by her cunning; Rafe Fenton, a handsome young scholar with more passion than sense; Ixkaab Balam, a tradeswoman from afar with skill for swords and secrets; and Micah, a gentle genius whose discoveries herald revolution. Sparks fly as these four lives intersect in a world where politics is everything, and outcasts are the tastemakers. Tread carefully, dear reader, and keep your wit as sharp as your steel.Originally presented in serial form by Serial Box Publishing, Tremontaine is brought to you by Ellen Kushner, Joel Derfner, Racheline Maltese, Paul Witcover, Tessa Gratton, and Karen Lord.

Genres: Fantasy, Audiobook, LGBT

607 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 22, 2018

About the author

Ellen Kushner weaves together multiple careers as a writer, radio host, teacher, performer and public speaker.

A graduate of Barnard College, she also attended Bryn Mawr College, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She began her career in publishing as a fiction editor in New York City, but left to write her first novel Swordspoint, which has become a cult classic, hailed as the progenitor of the “mannerpunk” (or “Fantasy of Manners”) school of urban fantasy. Swordspoint was followed by Thomas the Rhymer (World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award), and two more novels in her “Riverside” series. In 2015, Thomas the Rhymer was published in the UK as part of the Gollancz “Fantasy Masterworks” line.

In addition, her short fiction appears regularly in numerous anthologies. Her stories have been translated into a wide variety of languages, including Japanese, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Latvian and Finnish.

Upon moving to Boston, she became a radio host for WGBH-FM. In 1996, she created Sound & Spirit, PRI’s award-winning national public radio series. With Ellen as host and writer, the program aired nationally until 2010; many of the original shows can now be heard archived online.

As a live stage performer, her solo spoken word works include Esther: the Feast of Masks, and The Golden Dreydl: a Klezmer ‘Nutcracker’ for Chanukah (with Shirim Klezmer Orchestra). In 2008, Vital Theatre commissioned her to script a full-scale theatrical version. The Klezmer Nutcracker played to sold-out audiences in New York City, with Kushner in the role of the magical Tante Miriam.

In 2012, Kushner entered the world of audiobooks, narrating and co-producing “illuminated” versions of all three of the “Riverside” novels with SueMedia Productions for Neil Gaiman Presents at Audible.com—and winning a 2013 Audie Award for Swordspoint.

Other recent projects include the urban fantasy anthology Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black), and The Witches of Lublin, a musical audio drama written with Elizabeth Schwartz and Yale Strom (which one Gabriel, Gracie and Wilbur Awards in 2012). In 2015 she contributed to and oversaw the creation of the online Riverside series prequel Tremontaine for Serial Box with collaborators Joel Derfner, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Malinda Lo, Racheline Maltese and Patty Bryant.

A dauntless traveler, Ellen Kushner has been a guest of honor at conventions all over the world. She regularly teaches writing at the prestigious Clarion Workshop and the Hollins University Graduate Program in Children’s Literature.

Ellen Kushner is a co-founder and past president of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, an organization supporting work that falls between genre categories. She lives in New York City with author and educator Delia Sherman, a lot of books, airplane and theater ticket stubs, and no cats whatsoever.

Reviews

[Kyri Freeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy this shared-world series, despite the generally sluttish and cruel nature of characters and events and the mixed bag of writing quality. Unfortunately, in this one my favorite character got killed off, so we'll see if anybody more interesting appears in the final volume which I'll be reading next.

[Macha]

3 and a half stars.

[Tanya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Micah began to feel more and more uneasy. It was as if their words made one pattern while their bodies made completely different ones — discordant, inelegant, nothing like the perfect logic of geometry and equations. The game of Social Graces as Diane's guests played it was frustrating and jangling and somehow, she felt, dangerous. It was like looking at the stars' patterns and realizing that they weren't moving in a way that explained everything but just the opposite, an order of confusion. [loc. 4084]

After the events at the end of Season 2, I devoured Season 3 in search of resolutions -- some of which were granted -- and came away with further convolutions of plot. And Season 4 is mere rumour at present ...

Various characters bade permanent farewells to others at the end of Season 2: some of them are bearing their losses better than others. Kaab is steely, fearsome and haunted; Rafe is ill-advised and impetuous; and Micah, jarringly, is resident in Tremontaine House. More new characters are introduced, and characters who've been part of the cast since the beginning change and evolve, sometimes in unexpected directions. There are new romances, new ventures, and rising tension between the City and Riverside. And threats from outside the City, too: the arrival of an inspector from Kinwiinik, who has reason to hate Kaab; the continued presence of a military expert who has made an exhaustive study of the City's and the Land's defences; and the Land itself, which still has a taste for blood.

Delightfully complex, with a diverse cast (not just racially or culturally diverse, though they're that too) and a maze of motives, grudges, feuds and affairs: it can become overwhelming, but then we are not Diane, Duchess Tremontaine, whose hand is on all the threads, who plays games with everyone she knows. Only a few are clever and perceptive enough to provide much of a challenge. I'm looking forward to seeing their next moves.

[Theo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it a little more than the second season, but less than the first. The pacing seemed weird - events that should have been emotional climaxes, like Will's memorial, were barely given space to breathe, whereas lots of boring nonsense was overwritten, I guess to add to the sense of convoluted intrigue. I did find myself enjoying Kaab more this season than in the previous couple, and find her more compelling as a political foil and equal to Diane than as a hotheaded romantic heroine.