Goldenhand

Originally posted on bluchickenninja.com

If you haven't heard of the Old Kingdom series before this is a set of fantasy books set in a world where one part of the world is like normal 21st century and the other half is magic. It has this really interesting magic system where magic is literally drawn in the air. The whole series focuses on the current Abhorsen, this is a necromancer tasked with protecting the world from dead creatures and various other bad things.

The magic system is my favourite thing about this series. First of all you have the charter marks (magic) that can be used and imbedded into things to give them magical properties (swords for example). We have dead things that can come back from the dead and a necromancer who has to protect everyone from the dead things. They do that with a series of magical bells that can control the dead things. And there is the fact that death is an actual place the necromancers, it's explained as being a river but there are various levels to ‘death' which people go through before finally arriving at the ‘ninth gate' where they die the final death.

Goldenhand is the fifth book in this series and it is a direct sequel to Abhorsen which was the third book (the fourth book Clariel, was set 500 years before the others). The thing you have to understand is Abhorsen was released in 2003 and I read it around then. So I have basically been waiting 13 years for this book. I've been waiting so long for this book I gave up hope of there ever being a sequel to Abhorsen. So I had extremely high expectations for this, not only because I've been waiting a long time for it. But this has to come after the huge finale in Abhorsen which saw the main characters destroying literally the most evil thing to have ever existed in this universe. And I'm amazed to say it lived up to those expectations.

The main character of Goldenhand is a strong independent woman who don't need no man (this could be said about the whole series). Okay so this book is about her falling in love but thats okay because we have seen Lireal grow as a character over the last two books and she went from being a shy librarian to a kick ass necromancer who literally saved the universe. Even the whole falling in love thing is fine because it fits with her story. This love isn't something that came out of nowhere, Nix was hinting at it in the last book. And it fits with her growing up and learning how to cope with her new role.

Even after 5 books the dead still feel scary. In these books the dead are zombie-like creatures that are repelled by water. They take lots of different shapes. Some are dead bodies whose spirits were brought back to life by a necromancer. Over the last 5 books there have been numerous times where our main character was being chased by some type of dead creature. But Nix still manages to make those moments scary and you actually fear for the characters life.

I'm giving “Goldenhand” 4 stars instead of 3 because “The Old Kingdom” and the characters from the original trilogy have a special place in my heart. It was wonderful returning to the world of Free and Charter Magic, the seven bells of necromancers and the Abhorsen, and the weird colliding of worlds of Ancelstierre and the Old Kingdom. In “Goldenhand,” we get to venture into the northern parts of the world, which we learn to be largely outside of the influence of the Charter but where Free Magic can still be practiced by chained shamans of nomadic clans. Garth Nix also introduces a wonderful new character Ferrin, a young woman from one of those nomadic clans. Like all of Nix's female characters, Ferrin is wonderful to get to know.

Beyond world building, I think “Goldenhand” is mostly a continuation of Lirael's story. In the original trilogy, we got to see Lirael grow as a character: from a shy, isolated girl, whose only friend was a magical dog, to a heroine willing to sacrifice her life for her newfound friends and the world. “Goldenhand” shows Lirael in her element as a confident Abhorsen-in-Waiting, and sort of serves as an epilogue to the trilogy.Now for the cons. Apart from the awkwardly written romance with Nicholas Sayre (and the weird nascent romance between Sameth--who we hardly get to see--and Ferrin), there's not much character development at all. The novel was extremely quick to read, which I think was a blessing because the stakes never seemed particularly high and the character development in the form of Lirael's romance with Nick was cringey and not quite believable.

In the end, however, I had a good time reading “Goldenhand,” which took only about a day to read–a testament to how immersive Nix's world is. “Goldenhand” is a bit like a Christmas special of a beloved show, and it was wonderful seeing characters I grew up with in a setting that had such a powerful effect on my childhood imagination.