The Wounded Hawk: Book Two of the Crucible Trilogy Book

The heroic fantasy novels of Sarah Douglass--and The Wounded Hawk is typical in this respect--are deeply in love with moral ambiguities and with heroes keep on trying to find the right thing to do despite the fact they often unclear about the situations they find themselves in. Like its predecessor in "The Crucible" series, The Nameless Day, The Wounded Hawk takes place in a truncated late Middle Ages in which the deposition of Richard the Second, the Peasant's Revolt and the career of Joan of Arc are taking place in the same time frame; Douglass's neurotic warrior-priest hero Thomas Neville is deeply caught up in the intrigues of a Bolingbroke who is something other than human. Like Joan, Thomas regularly has chats with the angels; unlike her, he has learned to distrust them deeply and cast his loyalties elsewhere. This second book takes the premises of the first book and places an ever more complex spin on them; Douglass is sparing with her revelations to a point that makes us genuinely keep guessing what the real truth is about the relationship of heaven, hell and earth, and exactly which characters are human or authentically semi-divine.--Roz KaveneyRead More