The Unspoken Name

[psocoptera]

The Unspoken Name, A.K. Larkwood. So, I loved this. The premise is more or less "what if Tenar from Tombs of Atuan got rescued by a rather different wizard into a rather different world", although I could write a whole essay about how Larkwood may be playing with, riffing on, or inverting some of Le Guin's worldbuilding. Larkwood is also playing with a bunch of other fantasy tropes, which I'm going to put behind a spoiler cut from here (and then there will be bigger spoilers) - there are orcs and elves and I think possibly gnomes without ever using the words "orc" or "elf" or "gnome", wizards are secretly all clerics, the second major location is the city of "Grey Hook" which I took as an obvious Greyhawk reference. (And I'm not at all convinced the wizard's name starts with "Bel" by chance.) But, like, the way Le Guin's islands and ships have turned into airships traveling between worlds separated by portals, the way Le Guin's oceans have turned into Larkwood's deserts and dust and glass plains and ancient sea-bottoms, the blasted giant trees in the dust instead of giant rafts, the snakes instead of the dragons... it's so good. And I really liked the cast - some really interesting ambiguous characters and complex relationships, as well as an appealing romance. And the whole thing moved along well, and was nicely built in how it circled back around to things. And I loved the in-character sketchy map, I really like a good map, especially a map that does story work like that. I would definitely call this fantasy for fantasy readers - if you get annoyed by names that come with a pronunciation guide, you may find this annoying - but I am a fantasy reader, so hey.