What is the job of a sequel or second book in a series? Its job is to essentially do more of the same, but bigger and better as well as expand the story. Brian Staveley attempts these things (and more) in The Providence of Fire, the second book in his Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne series. Staveley picks up the stories of Valyn, Kaden, and Adare with a greater focus on the political situation in Annur through the eyes of Adare as the world is still reacting to the murder of their father and many plots against themselves.

The most welcome element of The Providence of Fire is the increased “screen time” of Adare, and more importantly, Adare as a character with agency who has an effect on events in the story. She goes through a rebirth as she leaves her city and trudges through muck and gathers a cadre of allies in her hope to take back what is hers by birthright and redeem her family’s name. Although the princess has lived a relatively sheltered life of royalty, she is willing to get dirty to see justice for her family and her people. Along the way she finds herself “taken in” by a harsh woman by the name of Nira, whom Adare comes to trust for the woman’s brutal honesty. There’s a threat of death and violence from Nira much of the time they are together, but as their relationship developed, I found some resonance with how Wesley depicts his life as a prisoner of the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride.

Kaden and Valyn are together, which is exactly where Staveley left the brothers at the end of The Emperor’s Blades. Valyn is thought to be a traitor and murderer of his brother even though Valyn saved his brother from a traitorous group within the elite Kettral forces in which he trained. Valyn is still coming to grips with the transformation he experienced near the end of the first novel, in which an awareness and magical abilities were sparked in him. The brothers are not together for long, since Kaden seeks intelligence and allies to gain revenge for his father’s murder.

The murder of an Emperor or ruler is not (at least in fiction and often in history) a happenstance thing. It is an event planned for by many, with wide-ranging repercussions. Where the immediacy of the Emperor’s death was shown in The Emperor’s Blades, only the far-ranging plot was hinted at in book one. In this second book, Staveley widens the canvas and illustrates the many enemies Annur has built up over years, even if the Emperor Sanlitun held an uneasy peace with some of those people. By this, I refer to Long Fist – a character who seems as if he walked right out of a Joe Abercrombie novel (and I intend that to be a compliment) – a tribal chief who is the first to unite many clans who have always been in conflict with each other with the common goal of toppling Annur. Another welcome addition was the point of view of Gwenna, a head strong member of Valyn’s wing.

What these two things prove out is how difficult communication over long distances is in a world with no real communication technology. Rumors and lies fuel people’s emotions and take characters down paths they would not otherwise travel had they known the truth. Kaden and Valyn are initially together as the novel begins, but Kaden’s quest leads him far away while Valyn attempts to return to his homeland, though his story is not as much in the forefront as it was in the previous volume.

Staveley parallels the character’s journeys in other ways. At times, each of the siblings is made a prisoner, and tangentially, while two of the siblings are at times together, all three are never together. While there are some echoes of the journey markers between each of the siblings, Staveley does well enough to ensure each of the three siblings is unique and has their own voice.

The Providence of Fire marks a “leveling up” in character development/story, a spreading out of the world canvas, a deepening of the plot, and the book is longer by about a hundred pages. While I enjoyed the novel, there were times I felt the weight of the story. Granted, my reading times while reading The Providence of Fire were a bit more sparse and intermittent when compared to my experience with The Emperor’s Blades, so that could be a factor in how I felt the weight of the book. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t enjoy the novel, because I enjoyed it a great deal. I just may have enjoyed it a bit more if there wasn’t so much of it.

To answer the charge I laid out at the top of this review, The Providence of Fire more than amply answers the challenge inherit in a second novel in a series, it did more of the same, in larger and improved ways and even answered many criticisms of the first book with a greater focus on female characters, thrusting Adare in the spotlight and giving us some insight into the character of Gwenna.

Recommended.

© 2015 Rob H. Bedford

Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Tor

Hardcover 978-0-7653-3641-5

January 2015, 608 Pages

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