Amazon Queen
Lori Devoti
Juno, Apr 2010, $7.99
ISBN: 9781439167724
In a shopping center in Beloit, Amazon Queen Zery and several of her tribe women manage to tale a baby away from two male Sons. However, before they can bring the infant to safety, they apparently lose the child back to a Son. Thus her leadership is challenged insidiously yet serendipitously by her supposed top advisor the High Priestess, who wants to be the Queen as does a newcomer. The Council offers no advice to her.
Matters turn ugly for Zery when not only is she removed from the throne by the Council and replaced by her alleged ally, but a Son she is attracted to admits to spying on her for five years. Furthermore, Zery has doubts that the old ways that has kept the Amazons superior to mankind work anymore as the Sons prove organized and their equal except with a greater thirst for destroying their female counterparts as they know first hand the gender cleansing done by their mothers. While Zery feels as if she fits nowhere; she fears for her race because of the internal squabble threatening to split the Amazons as much as the external threat from the Sons, but she feels hopeless to do anything about it..
The sequel to Amazon Ink is a terrific urban fantasy that focuses on the two disputes that place the Amazons in jeopardy. Zery tries to deal with both, but is kicked aside not by incompetence but by opportunism. She is a wonderful lead character who is no longer sure which threat is most dangerous to her people’s existence. Ironically her tribe and the Sons look at humanity as beneath them; yet she understands the threat caused by technology. Although there is a relatively minor romantic subplot; that takes a back seat to the prime story line of what will happen now that Zery’s word is no longer law.
Harriet Klausner
No comments:
Post a Comment