Riversend

Amberlight #2

by Sylvia Kelso

The Stunning Sequel to the Highly Acclaimed Amberlight Fighting doubt and convention, beset with great challenge and facing profound change, Tellurith leads her displaced House to a new beginning and a different life in Iskardaa life that includes men and women as equals. But the traditionalist Iskardans are outraged by Telluriths policies and appalled by her love for two husbands: Alkhes the rough, dark Outlander who brought Amberlight its doomand golden Sarth, epitome of the urbane men of the Amberlight Towers. To achieve Telluriths dream, both must re-shape their lives. To preserve the dream, all three must journey to Dhasdeins imperial capital of Riversend and face deadly menace and perilous machination.

Genres: Fantasy

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 26, 2009

About the author

Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which, The Moving Water (2006) and Amberlight (2007) were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards.
Her most recent novel-length work is a two-volume contemporary fantasy, the Blackston Gold series, The Solitaire Ghost, and The Time Seam.
Her novella, "Spring in Geneva," a riff on Frankenstein , came out from Aqueduct in 2013.
She has also published short stories in Australian and US anthologies, including "The Cretaceous Border" in Neverlands from Susurrus Press, "The Sharp-Shooter" in New Ceres Nights from 12th Planet Press, and "An Offer You Couldn't Refuse" in Love and Rockets from DAW. She lives in a house with a lot of trees but no cats.

Reviews

[Mely · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sequel to Amberlight. Following the destruction of the city of Amberlight and the powerful sentient stone known as qherique, Tellurith leads her displace House to a remote province, where traditionalists resist Tellurith's plans to treat men as equals and allow them access to traditionally female trades. Her reception isn't improved by the presence of her two husbands (her people are polygamous but only allow wives to share men). Her new tripartite marriage causes its own problems; her two husbands do not get along. Sarth is a traditional Amberlight man who was secluded in a harem and trained to please women, and Alkhes is a former general from a patriachal enemy who just waged war against Amberlight.

I like Kelso's vivid prose, but I have huge problems with her characterization. Alkhes doesn't adjust easily to Amberlight constraints, but he doesn't show much of the automatic prejudice that his culture would inculcate, and which is hard to root out even when you're trying. Tellurith is autocratic with her own husbands, who do not appear to realize it. And then there are the consent issues. Tellurith springs the news that she wants to have a threesome and not a V-relationship with her husbands while she's in bed with them. Consenting to sleep in the same bed with someone doesn't mean consenting to have sex with them, Tellurith, and this is something you should negotiate with them before you start making out with them in front of someone else, or with someone else in front of them. Alkhes, who was gang-raped in Amberlight, is tortured and raped again. A man is forced to marry his rapist -- but it's okay, he really liked it.

I'm not sure how many of the problems are deliberate -- the gender reversal of the easy tropes of a woman who becomes accustomed to the restraints of a society more patriachal than her own. But these tropes bug me done the usual way, and they bug me here.

[Siavahda]

While Riversend is just as beautifully written as its predecessor Amberlight, and much as I appreciated the addition of Alkhes and Sarth as first-person narrators of the story, I can't help but be uncomfortable with how rape is treated in this book. Specifically rape where the victim is male; leaving aside the arguably gratuitous amount of suffering Alkhes is forced to go through, the Sarthis/Zuri plotline bothered me a lot. What Zuri does is unquestionably sexual assault, but it's romanticized by the narrative in a way that none of the (attempted) male-on-female or male-on-male sexual violence is. Kelso makes an attempt to acknowledge how messed up this is - Zuri herself is ready to commit suicide afterwards, from guilt and shame - but... There's a whole lot of victim-blaming, and everyone seems more upset about the fact that Zuri is a sexual sadist than the fact that the 'incident' was rape. Sure, the former is alarming and disturbing to anyone who's not into that particular area of BDSM - but that the whole thing was non-consensual doesn't seem to ping on anybody's radar at all.

I don't know. Some of the aftermath makes sense in the context of this particular world and culture the author has created, but I can't pretend it made for easy reading.

Otherwise, this is a five-star book that I couldn't put down, and I loved it even more than I loved the first book, and am off to immediately buy book three. But I can't mark it as five-stars in good conscience, so I think I'm just going to leave this one completely unrated.

[K. Lincoln · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the continuation of Kelso's atmospheric, language-rich, angst-ridden tale of the destruction of a matriarchal fantastical city called Amberlight (first novel in the series); Riversend picks up right where we left off the main characters.

Tellurith, the Ruand (or head of a clannish house) of Amberlight and author of the destruction of the magical, sentient stone qherrique, and along with it, her entire city, is fleeing Amberlight for a vassal town far off in the North.

Along with her goes Alkhes-Assandar, the former Dhasdein general and Tellurith's lover, and her husband, the Tower (think male harem) bred Sarth.

Each will face sacrifices, challenges, and face some of their most terrible nightmares in order to forge a new life in their new home.

Reading Kelso's prose is like taking a dive head first into a warm pool of luscious language and rich emotion. Reminiscent to me of the depth of emotion and noble importance in Guy Gavriel Kay's writing, Kelso's characters feel so very much while striving to keep each other from harm.

Kelso tortures her characters, and us with them. And she makes us LIKE the torture, because it reminds us that we feel passion and love.

So why only four stars?

As in her first novel, the somewhat stream-of-consciousness writing, even during characters' dialogue, makes me back up and re read to try and figure out what the characters are referring to sometimes.

But, the mark of a good book for me is that the characters stay with you long after the last page is turned. And Tellurith and her two husbands, and the struggles they go through to be true to eachother and to love, will stay with me a long time.

This Book's Food Designation Rating : A long-simmered, richly seasoned stew in a broth to die for, that you dip a spoon into and savor slowly on your tongue, until you get a strange hint of bitterness from some incompletely cooked bit.

[Kay Cheung · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was breathtaking.

I read the previous book, Amberlight, and enjoyed the beautiful prose and the imagination at work. A city run by women and the mysterious sentient stone, querrique, is thrown into chaos by the arrival of a stranger. In places, I found the plot hard to follow, but by the end I was so caught up in the unique love story I just wanted more.

Riversend was an easier read – the prose has more clarity without losing its poetic qualities, bringing to life a different world, and the story is strong in its exploration of relationships under pressure.

Tellurith and her House are in exile after the destruction of the querrique, around which their society was based. Now she must lead her people, not only to safety, but through an upheaval in gender roles and traditions. At the heart of this is the struggle of her two husbands to accept their new roles, at odds with their upbringing.

I was a little thrown in places by plot twists that seemed to come out of nowhere, but it didn’t matter too much. The strength of the story was in the depth of moral integrity displayed by the main characters, and the exploration of their choices under intense and competing pressures of love and duty.

It is also a reflective tale on gender roles, an interesting mirror to our own society. In places, where actions shocked or surprised me, especially the depiction of sexual violence, I tried turning it around – if genders had been reversed, would I have felt the same? And when the answer was ‘no’, why not?

If you like fantasy based around mature, strong-willed characters, or are interested in gender roles and expectations, I think you’ll enjoy this.

[Fantasy Literature · Rating 4 out of 5]

Speculative fiction sometimes gets a bad rap for being nothing but "escapism." While there are certainly plenty of "just for fun" books in the genre, what people sometimes forget is that sci-fi and fantasy have often been a place where writers can experiment with unusual prose styles and tackle controversial themes that might not go over well in mainstream, "realistic" fiction. Sylvia Kelso's Riversend is an ambitious novel, blending dense, lyrical prose with a thought-provoking look at gender roles and unconventional relationships, and it's a good story to boot.

The prose is not going to be for everyone. It took me a little while to catch the rhythm of it. The narration is poetic and filled with sentences that are often long, descriptive, comma-laden, and sometimes fragmentary, as in this description of the character Alkhes:
Worse than outland; rankless, name... Read More: http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi...

[Warren Rochelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is Sylvia's best so far. The three narrators who tell the story are each vivid and engaging as they try to sort out who they are to each other, who they are to themselves in this new world (after the fall of the city of Amberlight, the first in this series, everything changes), and who they are in the world post-Amberlight. Good plot twists, lots of the rich description Sylvia is known for, and it kept me reading.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Australian fantasy author does a great job of showing changing times and clashing societies.
This imaginary land and characters still somehow reflect Australia which makes for a fun slant.