Juliet Marillier

Sevenwaters — (2000-2010) Publisher: Lovely Sorcha is the seventh child and only daughter of Lord Colum of Sevenwaters. Bereft of a mother, she is comforted by her six brothers who love and protect her. Sorcha is the light in their lives, they are determined that she know only contentment. But Sorcha's joy is shattered when her father is bewitched by his new wife, an evil enchantress who binds her brothers with a terrible spell, a spell which only Sorcha can lift — by staying silent. If she speaks before she completes the quest set to her by the Fair Folk and their queen, the Lady of the Forest, she will lose her brothers forever. When Sorcha is kidnapped by the enemies of Sevenwaters and taken to a foreign land, she is torn between the desire to save her beloved brothers, and a love that comes only once. Sorcha despairs at ever being able to complete her task, but the magic of the Fair Folk knows no boundaries, and love is the strongest magic of them all...

Daughter of the Forest

In Daughter of the Forest, Juliet Marillier deftly sets the fairy tale "The Six Swans" in dark-ages Ireland; think of the general time period of The Mists of Avalon, when Christian and Pagan, Gael and Briton and Saxon, were fighting and feuding and even sometimes getting along. The tale fits in amazingly well in the setting; the famous fairy tale echoes the Irish legend of Fionnuala and the children of Lir, which predated it. The transformations, the impossible quests, the painful vows work perfectly in the Celtic milieu.

Sorcha is the determined sister of the tale; she is a young girl with a healing gift and a love of nature. In fact, it must be Marillier's love for nature's beauty that shines through Sorcha's words; every page is filled with lovely descriptions and a sense of magic. Her mission, to weave shirts of stinging starwort for her six brothers while remaining silent, is made even more poignant by two of Marillier's additions to the tale. First, Sorcha is a born storyteller; everything she does has a story to be told with it, and even as she keeps herself mute, she tells stories to herself in her mind. Second, Marillier has given each of the brothers a distinct personality. Some remain somewhat two-dimensional, but two or three of the brothers are vivid as life, and this makes their plight more urgent to the reader.

I am floored when I hear that this was Juliet Marillier's first novel. The beauty of the prose, the vision of nature, the haunting love stories, and the vivid characters ensure that I'll be reading the two sequels, and anything else Marillier writes after that. Wonderful. —Kelly Lasiter

Son of the Shadows

With this novel, Juliet Marillier returns to the Celtic world of her first novel, the fantastic Daughter of the Forest, about eighteen years later. Sorcha and Hugh have lived happily together, and have three children, Niamh, Sean, and Liadan. Niamh is a restless beauty with a case of wanderlust; Sean is a future leader growing up in his uncle Liam's mold; and Liadan is her mother's successor, a storyteller and healer. But Liadan is not Sorcha; having grown up in a loving environment, Liadan is well-aware of her own worth, and acts with more confidence and defiance than Sorcha did. In some ways I like Liadan better; in some ways I prefer Sorcha. But both are ever engaging.

The "son of the shadows" of the title is Ciaran, a young druid who falls in star-crossed love with Niamh. (Now, those of you who have read Daughter of the Forest know there is a problem with this!) Ciaran strikes off on his own after Niamh is forbidden to him; he is torn between love and honor, and between the disciplined magic of the druids and the darker sorcery inherited from his mother. I am very interested in what happens to him, and to Niamh; I just hope Marillier deals with them in book three, as they are almost peripheral to this book, despite the title. This is Liadan's story.

Liadan thinks she knows exactly what kind of life lies before her, until she falls in love with the leader of an outlaw band. She spends the rest of the book using magic, wit, and courage to try and keep her family and her lover from killing one another — a Herculanean task — while also rebelling against the Fair Folk's desire to use her as a pawn in their plots. This is the biggest difference between Sorcha and Liadan; Liadan never seems to obey anyone if she can help it. Sorcha was more willing to submit to the Fair Folk's plans.

Son of the Shadows is a well-written and emotionally engaging story. It feels bloodier and less magical than Daughter of the Forest, but it's pretty good anyway, and even as it ends, we feel the storms brewing that will need to be dealt with in Child of the Prophecy. This story ain't over yet, not by a long shot. I eagerly await the third book, and the final resolution to all this turmoil. —Kelly Lasiter

Child of the Prophecy

While, like Son of the Shadows, Child of the Prophecy is never quite as wonderful as Daughter of the Forest, it is nevertheless a good book, and worth reading if you liked the first two.

This one is darker in tone. In Daughter of the Forest, the heroes and villains were clearly delineated; in Son of the Shadows the line between the two was more hazy, but the heroine herself was beyond reproach. In Child of the Prophecy the heroine, Fainne, is a conflicted and flawed character in ways that Sorcha and Liadan never were.

Fainne, child of the forbidden union of Ciaran and Niamh, is raised by her father in the lonely reaches of Kerry. When her father falls ill, Fainne's grandmother, the evil Oonagh, takes Fainne under her wing. The sorceress has a diabolical plan that will destroy all of the good of Sevenwaters, and Fainne is to be her tool. Through threats and emotional blackmail, she presses the girl into her service; through trickery, she causes Fainne to do some truly terrible things. Fainne feels she is destined to be forever evil and forever alone, and so she does not fight back — until the people of Sevenwaters reach out to her, and she begins to understand love and family. "You forget," says one character, "that every girl has two grandmothers."

Once Fainne begins to grow a spine, the dark and depressing narrative turns passionate and exciting. How can she carry out Oonagh's scheme? Is it possible to fight her? How strong can Fainne be?

Again, while this is not the romantic "fairy tale" ofDaughter of the Forest it is an engaging story and a fitting ending to the Sevenwaters saga. Fainne is much more than she seems. If you can get through the first half of the book, you'll love the second half. —Kelly Lasiter

Seer of Sevenwaters

Quiet, intuitive Sibeal has always known she was destined to become a druid. Just when she is on the verge of completing her training, however, her mentor Ciaran bids her spend a summer on Inis Eala, where two of her sisters live and where her cousin Johnny runs a warriors’ school. When a Viking ship is wrecked on Inis Eala’s shores, the resulting events change Sibeal’s life and the lives of everyone on Inis Eala.

There are three survivors of the wreck of Freyja: Knut, a sturdy Norseman who quickly wins friends on the island; Svala, Knut’s wife, who does not speak and behaves most strangely; and Felix, a young scholar with amnesia, whose elusive memories harbor a deadly secret. Sibeal helps nurse Felix back to health and finds herself drawn to him, and for the first time in her life she questions her spiritual vocation.

One can always depend upon a Juliet Marillier book to provide lovely writing, haunting magic, and a sweet, slow-building romance. Longtime fans will also enjoy the reappearance of characters from earlier in the Sevenwaters series; at this point some of them feel almost like members of the reader’s own family! Marillier makes great use of recurring motifs, both from earlier in Seer of Sevenwaters (e.g. someone being tied up on the ship) and from previous books in the series (Svala, a mute foreigner adrift in a strange land, can’t help but remind one of Daughter of the Forest’s Sorcha — except this time we see the character from the outside, and her secret is a different one).

Roughly the second half of Seer of Sevenwaters is taken up with a dangerous quest. As the need for the quest becomes apparent, Marillier shows us the conflict within the characters of Inis Eala. The central characters are wonderfully honorable people, and it’s that very honor that causes the conflict; they want to do “the right thing,” but what does that mean when there seem to be two “right things?” The men are torn between the necessity of the quest and their desire to stay home and protect their wives and children. The women want to keep their men safely at home, but at the same time, they want their husbands to be the kind of men who will face danger for a good cause. Sibeal knows she too must undertake the journey, and that a difficult choice lies ahead for her as well. The eventual resolution of the adventure is beautiful and in keeping with Celtic mythology. The resolution of Sibeal’s dilemma works well too.

After finishing Seer of Sevenwaters, I wanted to jog my memory about a few plot points from the original Sevenwaters trilogy, and thumbed back through two of those books. What struck me then was how much less grim Seer of Sevenwaters is. I remembered the beauty and magic of the first three books, but what I had forgotten was how many misfortunes are heaped upon those first three heroines (and other innocents) and how much they suffer before they eventually triumph. While bad things do happen in Seer of Sevenwaters, there is more of a pervasive sense of hope throughout the story. I’m not sure if this reflects a change in me or a change in Marillier’s writing — or if it’s intentional, meant to show that the actions of Sorcha, Liadan, and Fainne gave Sibeal’s generation a better world to live in. —Kelly Lasiter