[King's Shield, book 3 of Inda, comes out today. Review soon!]

I’m normally not a fan of ‘epic’ fantasy (as evidenced by the fact that I could not stomach the works of the late Robert Jordan, although many of my friends quite enjoyed them). Generally an author who makes a globe of her world out of a beach ball and has been building and writing in the same world since the mid-60s would be considered an epic fantasy author. Quite often a trilogy quartet set in a time of global war and chronicling the life of the greatest king of the world would register as an epic fantasy. Somehow Sherwood Smith avoids a lot of that, and I mean it as a compliment. Epic fantasy can also often mean characters that are gods or in many ways godlike and just not terribly accessible. I don’t know how she does it, but she writes very human fantasy on an epic scale. Or perhaps epic fantasy on a human scale. In either case, one might have guessed by now that I enjoy Sherwood Smith’s works quite a bit.

Indevan-Dal Algara-Vayir of Choraed Alger, in Iasca Leror (later called Marloven Hesea, and then Marloven Hess) is the son of a prince, but not a royal prince. He’s a second son, which means that he is expected to conduct the home defense of the lands for his older brother, once that brother becomes the Adaluin (territorial prince). When he is ten, the rules somehow change and all the second sons are called into the capital to undergo the same strict military education as their older brothers. Inda (as he is called) goes gleefully.

Unfortunately, politics are afoot. Iasca Leror is expecting at least three kinds of attacks – the Venn, mighty sea warriors; those from Norsunder, evil magicians; or pirates. The king’s younger brother is hoping for one of these, since it’s what he’s trained his whole life for. Said younger brother, the Shield Arm, also hates the Algara-Vayirs with his entire soul. This is a bit problematic, as Inda’s older sister Hadand is engaged to the royal heir, the king’s older son. The royal heir (Sierlaef) is the Shield Arm’s favorite person in the world, since he feels he can control him and thereby retain power for a longer period of time. Inda and his older brother Tanrid both have difficult times at the military academy. Tanrid is never quite close to the Sierlaef, but Inda becomes good friends with the younger and less-favored royal son, the Varlaef (called Sponge, for his reddish hair). An incident, engineered by the Shield Arm and abetted by the Sierlaef, happens in Inda’s second year at the academy, and Inda’s entire life changes.

The Fox starts immediately after the end of Inda; it contains a similar format to the last half of the first volume.

The characters are wonderful. Inda, perhaps, wasn’t my favorite, but his sister Hadand and Sponge are two of my favorites. There are a few in The Fox whom I enjoyed as well, but I’m afraid to give away too much about that book (which would, incidentally, spoil a good deal of the second half of Inda). There are a lot of characters and some of them have very similar names, but Ms. Smith is awfully good at making sure you know who, precisely, she’s talking about. Her settings are very detailed, as you might guess from the beach-ball comment above. No detail escapes her world-building, from the Waste Spell (for bathroom needs) to horses to pleasure houses. I’m not sure how much research she did on military training, but her academy is incredibly well-thought-out and workable. (So much so that she used the same setting, albeit several hundred years later, for her upcoming novel Stranger to Command.)

While, having finished Inda, the pacing makes sense to me, especially the first half of the book, when I was reading it, it seemed slow. The problem for me was, as a reader, I usually expect the pacing of the first, say, quarter of the book to be the pacing of the whole book. The first 150 pages of the book cover less than a year. Inda starts the book at 10 and, if the whole book stayed at the pacing of the beginning, he’d end the book at about 13, and it would be a bit slow. (He ends the book at about seventeen.) It also wouldn’t really be an adult’s book, and things need to move more quickly because we need to get to some fighting. Luckily, the second half of the book moves much more quickly than the first. Once I got there, I finally understand that all the complicated political setup (which takes time) of the first half of the book was completely necessary for the faster-paced and more action-packed second half of the book. I promise: it works. I just got a little worried at the beginning.

The Fox, on the other hand, is just amazing from beginning to end. It seemed to suck both Ben and me in, and refused to let us go even after the book is over. The pacing is fantastic; she knew just when to slow things down enough for us to enjoy the high-action sequences even more. I would not recommend starting this book too late in the day; I never wanted to put it down. I would love to praise more things about this book (mostly a specific part of her knowledge of the setting she’s chosen), but it would probably give away what I’m trying not to give away.

A note, though: these are not children’s books. I mean, I’d comfortably give them to a mature 14-year-old who likes dense, complicated books, and I’m not even worried about the amount of sex and violence. (Although there are many more sexual references in volume 2.) Younger readers with the ability to absorb and process the amount of politicking and the intricacies of human nature that this book has aren’t incredibly common, though. Give the younger readers her Crown Duel (the two-in-one Crown and Court Duet) or the Wren books.

Inda gets 4/5 stars and The Fox gets 5/5 stars.