Author: Amy Rae Durreson
Publisher: DSP Publications
Pages/Word Count: 350 Pages
At a Glance: The plot of this book is every bit as robust and gorgeous as that of Reawakening.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Overthrowing the Shadow that ruled Tiallat was only the first step. For rebel leader Iskandir, rebuilding his shattered country is an even greater challenge. A poor harvest, religious conflict, and years of tyrannical governance combine with the challenge of getting the soldiers of the Shadow’s army home and rehousing the exiled who are flooding back into free Tiallat.
Then people begin to get sick.
A thousand years ago, after the Shadow’s first defeat, a blight fell upon the north: a disease that killed more than the war itself. Now, as this plague returns, Iskandir must look north again to the newly awakened dragon Halsarr, a learned doctor and professor who wants no part in a new war. Even if Halsarr agrees to come to their aid, Iskandir is afraid of the truth he will expose. For the dragon Halsarr once loved a bold and reckless steppes elemental who later transformed into the lonely and powerful Dual God of Tiallat, the two-faced Lord who has been missing since the Shadow entered the country.
Review: War, Pestilence, Famine, Death… if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were to run roughshod through a land of gods and dragons and a persistent and pervasive corruption called the Shadow, that land would look quite a lot like Tiallat, a place protected by the Dual God—the Bright Lord and the Dark God in one man, Iskandir of Rulat. Tiallat sprang from the remains of Savattin rule, survived more like it, but there may be no survival for its people now, not once the Shadow that had once been sent scattering by the dragon king Tarnamel and his desert god Alagard in this author’s brilliant Reawakening is done laying waste to every man, woman, and child to get to Iskandir.
Resistance isn’t as much a sequel as it is a continuation of the mythology Ms. Durreson is crafting in this verse, a mythology where dragons claim their hordes and thus, offer those people love and protection—a love and protection that Iskandir believes he no longer deserves now that Halsarr, the dragon who has woken after a thousand years of sleeping, has returned—still very much considering Iskandir his beloved—“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” Regardless of how vehemently Iskandir insists he’s changed in the past thousand years, sure that Hal can no longer love who he’s become, there is no doubt throughout this story that their bond is irrevocable. Their connection—though untried and dormant for so long—still flows between them, and it’s this romanticism Durreson taps into which makes this novel a beautiful love story alongside a Pandora’s box of anguish loosed upon this world in the form of a plague which tests faith and threatens to extinguish every life in its wake.
Faith is a dominant motif throughout this novel, as Iskandir struggles with the mantle of responsibility as Dual God and the burden he carries after he once, long ago, had fled from his people. Iskandir keeps his divinity hidden from everyone but Hal—out of fear and uncertainty and also out of grief over the loss of his twin Zohrab, who was once the Bright Lord to Iskandir’s Dark God, two halves of the same whole. There are family struggles that play their roles in the twists and turns this story takes—not necessarily in blood family but in the people who have become so integral in Iskandir’s life, and it is for them, perhaps, he feels most unworthy. Every characterization in this novel is a person who serves a purpose in the plot, even down to the smallest child. There are losses, some which left me in tears, and there are victories which are hard won and offer triumph through the suffering.
The plot of this book is every bit as robust and gorgeous as that of Reawakening. There are moments of joy among the sorrow, and suspense amid Death that runs rampant through the streets of Tiallat and lays waste to those in its path. Durreson once again engages the reader’s imagination and uses her talent to illuminate every scene and paint a word picture that allows us to envision every detail of this novel’s setting. Resistance is a hero’s journey through trials by fire, a fire that burns strong and true and faithful, and cleanses and strengthens a god’s soul.
Book three of this series has been setup at the end of Resistance, another dragon set to awaken, and Raif—Iskandir’s most faithful friend—will begin his own journey to meet his future.
This series is a thing of beauty for lovers of high fantasy. That’s really all that needs saying about both Reawakening and now, Resistance.
You can buy Resistance here:
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