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World Gates #2
Shadow Prince
Book Two in the World Gates series. The kingdom of Nord D'Rae was destroyed ten years ago, although there are hundreds of theories as to how and why it happened. Popular sentiment blames the bastard prince Reynart D'Altha. But no one is foolish enough to ask the deadly assassin that Reynart has become. Fantasy artist Angie Blanchard was assured by her psychiatrist that her visit to the imaginary kingdom of Nord D'Rae was a particularly vivid coma dream. The obsession threatens not only her sanity but her life. Finding out that the fantasy world is real doesn't change that threat, only transforms it. When Angie is magically transported to Reynart's world, his plans for vengeance are interrupted by the mage council's representative. The destruction of Nord D'Rae destabilized the world's magical gateways, a situation which has recently become critical. The mage needs both Angie and Reynart to help her restore the broken Nord D'Rae gateway, then seal it for good. On their quest, they must face the lies and betrayals of ten years ago. Too bad they'd rather kill each other.
330 pages, Paperback
First published July 1, 2005
7 people want to read
About the author
Jennifer Dunne
35 books8 followersJennifer Dunne wrote her first “book” at the age of four, telling the story of a lost little girl and the helpful elephant who leads her home. She was all set for a career in the literary arts, to begin in that far off misty future after kindergarten — then she discovered a book about “the new math” on the coffee table, and fell in love with numbers instead. After getting a degree in math followed by a masters degree in artificial intelligence, she joined IBM and devoted herself to doing neat things with computers, all the time continuing to write stories as a way of balancing so much logical brain activity.
She is the author of over a dozen novels and novellas spanning the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and romance. (She’s either a unique individual who is difficult to categorize, or easily bored – you decide.) Beyond that, there’s no point describing her hobbies or activities, since they’ll have changed by the time you read this. (Score one for “easily bored”.) She recently relocated to Colorado, to play the lead role in her very own love story, thankfully with fewer explosions, occult happenings, and dire situations than in her fiction. Although, there was that one time...
She is the author of over a dozen novels and novellas spanning the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and romance. (She’s either a unique individual who is difficult to categorize, or easily bored – you decide.) Beyond that, there’s no point describing her hobbies or activities, since they’ll have changed by the time you read this. (Score one for “easily bored”.) She recently relocated to Colorado, to play the lead role in her very own love story, thankfully with fewer explosions, occult happenings, and dire situations than in her fiction. Although, there was that one time...
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July 15, 2011
Jennifer Dunne, World Gates, vol. 2: Shadow Prince (Cerridwen Press, 2005)
After I read Not Quite Camelot, Jennifer Dunne's fun initial entry in the World Gates series, for some strange reason it took me four years to get round to reading book two. Even stranger, it's now taken me ten months to get round to writing the review of book two (I finished the book, according to my spreadsheet, on 1May2012, and I am writing this paragraph on 18Mar2013). I have no idea why, as I enjoyed it a great deal; in fact, I think it improves upon the original, and I'm hoping, even eight years on, that Miz Dunne has a book three up her sleeve she just hasn't sprung on us yet; she's done some really good world-building in these two books, and when the second one ends, while it does feel like an ending (and a more final one than we got from Not Quite Camelot), as with any good world-building she's left all kinds of openings in which one can ask, “what happens after 'happily ever after'?”
NOTE: the next paragraph necessarily contains major spoilers for Not Quite Camelot. If you haven't read it yet and are planning to, skip the plot synopsis.
Set ten years after the events of Not Quite Camelot, Shadow Prince opens with Angie Blanchard now a young artist living on her own in the middle of nowhere, relying on her agent to sell her paintings—all of which are fantasy-themed works concerning Nord D'Rae, which she has become convinced after years of therapy was all a dream she had in the back of that station wagon. (And Angie is still not at all comfortable with the modern world.) And thus it is that when Angie is yanked back into the parallel universe—where Nord D'Rae is now a blasted, destroyed land, and that destruction is blamed on Angie's old flame Prince Reynart, now a rogue assassin—she figures she's dreaming again. And, of course, she runs into Reynart, with both of them believing the other abandoned them a decade before...but they have no choice but to work together before the actual agent of Nord D'Rae's destruction (and we all know who that is if we've read Not Quite Camelot, yes?) manages to free the now-blocked Nord D'Rae gate and unleash that destruction upon the rest of the world.
Don't get me wrong, this is another fantasy-romance novel just like the first book in the series. But unlike the rest of the Dunne novels I've read, this one puts the bulk of the work on the first genre rather than the second; Angie and Reynart are all about the fighting outside the sheets and the grappling between them, but there's more attention paid to what's going on out in the rest of the world. Specifically, this is a basic quest narrative, rag-tag party and all, and Dunne spends a good deal more time than I would have expected making sure the other mambers of said party are just as interesting and individual as characters as are Angie and Reynart. Good stuff indeed, a satisfying entry in what I hope will eventually be a continuing series. *** ½
After I read Not Quite Camelot, Jennifer Dunne's fun initial entry in the World Gates series, for some strange reason it took me four years to get round to reading book two. Even stranger, it's now taken me ten months to get round to writing the review of book two (I finished the book, according to my spreadsheet, on 1May2012, and I am writing this paragraph on 18Mar2013). I have no idea why, as I enjoyed it a great deal; in fact, I think it improves upon the original, and I'm hoping, even eight years on, that Miz Dunne has a book three up her sleeve she just hasn't sprung on us yet; she's done some really good world-building in these two books, and when the second one ends, while it does feel like an ending (and a more final one than we got from Not Quite Camelot), as with any good world-building she's left all kinds of openings in which one can ask, “what happens after 'happily ever after'?”
NOTE: the next paragraph necessarily contains major spoilers for Not Quite Camelot. If you haven't read it yet and are planning to, skip the plot synopsis.
Set ten years after the events of Not Quite Camelot, Shadow Prince opens with Angie Blanchard now a young artist living on her own in the middle of nowhere, relying on her agent to sell her paintings—all of which are fantasy-themed works concerning Nord D'Rae, which she has become convinced after years of therapy was all a dream she had in the back of that station wagon. (And Angie is still not at all comfortable with the modern world.) And thus it is that when Angie is yanked back into the parallel universe—where Nord D'Rae is now a blasted, destroyed land, and that destruction is blamed on Angie's old flame Prince Reynart, now a rogue assassin—she figures she's dreaming again. And, of course, she runs into Reynart, with both of them believing the other abandoned them a decade before...but they have no choice but to work together before the actual agent of Nord D'Rae's destruction (and we all know who that is if we've read Not Quite Camelot, yes?) manages to free the now-blocked Nord D'Rae gate and unleash that destruction upon the rest of the world.
Don't get me wrong, this is another fantasy-romance novel just like the first book in the series. But unlike the rest of the Dunne novels I've read, this one puts the bulk of the work on the first genre rather than the second; Angie and Reynart are all about the fighting outside the sheets and the grappling between them, but there's more attention paid to what's going on out in the rest of the world. Specifically, this is a basic quest narrative, rag-tag party and all, and Dunne spends a good deal more time than I would have expected making sure the other mambers of said party are just as interesting and individual as characters as are Angie and Reynart. Good stuff indeed, a satisfying entry in what I hope will eventually be a continuing series. *** ½
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