Synopsis: Life has brought a mixed parcel of news to young Quint, sky pirate’s son-turned-academic. He has been accepted into the hallowed halls of the Knights Academy as a squire, but his mentor, the Most High Academe, is dead and his daughter, Quint’s best friend Maris, has been banished to Undertown. Worse awaits, however, as Quint learns of a conspiracy to undo all of his mentor’s work by instigating a new purge of earth scholarship from the schools of Sanctaphrax, a conspiracy that will give many selfish and power-hungry individuals a chance to make their moves. And all around, the weather is getting colder and the mighty floating rock of Sanctaphrax is straining at its anchor chain.

Review: The Winter Knights is the eighth book in Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell’s Edge Chronicles and the second in the Quint series. It retains the energetic charm of the earlier works in the series, along with their dark edge, and there are enough breathless chases, last minute rescues and vile villainies to plot three or four books in a lesser series. The pace of the story is swift, even demanding; guided by Stewart’s breathless text, a year of training simply flies by and you can get completely lost if the phone rings in the middle of a particularly busy paragraph. The Edge Chronicles is a sprawling epic, spanning a period of some one hundred years in the history of the Edge across nine books. Because the Quint trilogy is the most recent to be written but the first of the three chronologically, there are many events in The Winter Knights which foreshadow those in earlier books, while some details of the story being told here will already be known to regular readers. The fact that you know it will be decades before the vile and slimy Vilnix Pompolonius receives any kind of comeuppance adds an extra depth to the sense of injustice whenever he succeeds in putting one over on our heroes.

2006-10-25