“Sword of Fire” by Katharine Kerr

When you love a series, one of the biggest joys is seeing it end well. It’s bittersweet, knowing they’ll be no more. But that is exponentially better than seeing it outstay its welcome, fading away into something that diminishes the whole. 

So when that a series ends, but then the author decides to revisit the world, I’m always wary. As much as I want there to be more books in the series, will they add to the brilliance of the original, or dilute it? 

With Sword of Fire, Kerr manages to hit all the same notes I loved about the Deverry books, but is missing that uniqueness of the original series. 

What Kerr has done right is not try to bring us back to the world we knew before as it was. Sword of Fire kicks off 400 or so years after the originals wrapped up, showing us a world that has moved on while still being recognisable. It’s no longer the very Celtic, Anglo-Saxon style of before, and feels as if it has moved more towards a medieval/Tudor atmosphere to me. 

One of the points of the original series was reincarnation, and seeing each soul live different lives in different time periods. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who went into this book wanting to know which characters were reincarnations of who, and ended up disappointed that this was not forthcoming. This bugged me at the start. Having lost that connection from the original books, seeing how each reincarnation reflected the last, it didn’t feel the same. 

But by the end, I’m glad Kerr took this route. It allows the story to start anew, a clean break from what came before. And I actually started to enjoy trying to work it out through context. When one character demonstrated a certain combat style, or when another laughed in a certain way, I had the flash of joy from realising who they were. 

And I’m fairly confident there were a couple of characters and references that were from the previous books that I missed, simply because it’s been so long since I read them. 

But what detracts from this book is the linear timeline. 

What always drew me to the Deverry series was the twisting, intertwined, Celtic Knot of its timeline. The way each character’s lives were influenced by their actions and decision in previous incarnations. The way we learnt bits of history to reveal truths about the more recent timelines. The way truths about certain characters were kept hidden until they became relevant to the story, so. 

But Sword of Fire doesn’t have this. It’s one lifetime, one story, told in a simple, linear fashion. And it’s not a particularly twisting or surprising plot. But without the hook of the way the Deverry books were one series told across many timelines, it just felt - to me - to be a little too generic fantasy. 

This isn’t helped but the fact that we don’t focus on any characters who use Dwoemer this time. Or dwimmer as it’s now known. It exists, but only on the periphery of the main character’s experiences.

Again, I can see that this was a deliberate decision to differentiate this story from the previous ones. And it’s also clear that it will be brought in more in future books of this new trilogy. But it’s one more thing missing that used to make the series stand out. The literal “magic” from before is missing. 

So overall, I’m glad Kerr is visiting Deverry again. This isn’t a bad book in any sense, but it just lacks a certain uniqueness and magic that the previous books held. What I suspect it that it’s setting up a lot to come in the next book, so I’m excited to see where Kerr takes this. 

In the meantime, I might think about making time to reread the originals.