Vincalis the Agitator [Import] [Unbound]

Holly Lisle (Author)

Product Details

• Unbound
• Publisher: Warner Books (March 2002)
• ISBN-10: 075958690X
• ISBN-13: 978-0759586901
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Holly Lisle has been writing fiction professionally since 1991, when she sold FIRE IN THE MIST, the novel that won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel. She has to date published more than thirty novels and several comprehensive writing courses. She is currently working on the second book in her Cadence Drake series.

Holly had an ideal childhood for a writer...which is to say, it was filled with foreign countries and exotic terrains, alien cultures, new languages, the occasional earthquake, flood, or civil war, and one story about a bear, which follows:

"So. Back when I was ten years old, my father and I had finished hunting ducks for our dinner and were walking across the tundra in Alaska toward the spot on the river where we'd tied our boat. We had a couple miles to go by boat to get back to the Moravian Children's Home, where we lived.

"My father was carrying the big bag of decoys and the shotgun; I was carrying the small bag of ducks.

"It was getting dark, we could hear the thud, thud, thud of the generator across the tundra, and suddenly he stopped, pointed down to a pie-pan sized indentation in the tundra that was rapidly filling with water, and said, in a calm and steady voice, "That's a bear footprint. From the size of it, it's a grizzly. The fact that the track is filling with water right now means the bear's still around."

"Which got my attention, but not as much as what he said next.


" 'I don't have the gun with me that will kill a bear,' he told me. 'I just have the one that will make him angry. So if we see the bear, I'm going to shoot him so he'll attack me. I want you to run to the river, follow it to the boat, get the boat back home, and tell everyone what happened.'

"The rest of our walk was very quiet. He was, I'm sure, listening for the bear. I was doing my damnedest to make sure that I remembered where the boat was, how to get to it, how to start the pull-cord engine, and how to drive it back home, because I did not want to let him down.

"We were not eaten by a bear that night...but neither is that walk back from our hunt for supper a part of my life I'll ever forget.

"I keep that story in mind as I write. If what I'm putting on paper isn't at least as memorable as having a grizzly stalking my father and me across the tundra while I was carrying a bag of delicious-smelling ducks, it doesn't make my cut."

Cheerfully,
Holly Lisle

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Vincalis the Agitator by Holly Lisle, March 5, 2002

By 

Jim Mills (Chicago area, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Vincalis the Agitator (Paperback)

This is a prequel to the Secret Texts trilogy and answers a lot of questions left open in Diplomacy of Wolves, Vengeance of Dragons and Courage of Falcons, such as what are all those circles on the maps and how did they get there? Who was Vincalis and why did he write the Secret Texts, the bible of the Falcons? What were the dragons like when they were in power? Who was Solander and why was he so revered? Who were Luercas and Dafril?

The characters are deep, each with their own conflicting agendas, desires and motives, and they're as mixed up about life as we are. The plot and subplots are rich and complex and flow very well. Actions have logical consequences, but with surprises, too.

Overall, this is a great book and well worth buying and reading!...

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Holly's best yet, May 4, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Vincalis the Agitator (Paperback)

If you've enjoyed "Secret texts" and you've come looking for more of the same you're in for a pleasant surprise. Holly's excelled herself this time. This novel takes us behind the scenes of the intrigues needed to keep magic going. And there we find some real heroes and truly villainous villains, people who'd consign the human soul to destruction so that they could get through a gas crisis.

In Wraith she's given us a hero worth the name, and his struggles with a vast, powerful and seemingly invincible enemy make the book an absolute page-turner. There's a sense of bereavement, of being turned out in the cold when you hit the last page that's a sign of how deeply Holly's pulled you in.

Buy it, enjoy it and be prepared to be yelled at when you're still reading at 3am.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How a society can run headlong into catastrophe, August 7, 2002

By 

Bookivore "The Bookivore" (Oklahoma, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Vincalis the Agitator (Paperback)

Holly has returned to the world of the Secret Texts trilogy for this story of a different era - the time before the Mage Wars when magic use was ubiquitous, most of society was rich beyond our current standards of affluence, and everything depended on a dark core that few knew about, ruled by a powerful cadre that have completely lost track of morality.

The book opens with Wraith, a boy with an uncanny immunity to magic, leaves the under city searching for untainted food, flees guards who intend to kill him for theft, and runs into a friendly, over privileged young man, Solander. Wraith, his rescued (female) friend Jess and Solander soon form a classic love triangle - Solander is taken by Jess, Jess is enamored with Wraith, and Wraith has fallen for the first good-looking confident young woman he has ever met, Velyn.

But the main issue of the story is not love. It's how to deal with the horrible injustice that Wraith digs up when he insists on finding an explanation for the creation and maintenance of the Warrens - places that the general population think are crime-ridden, terrible cankers of ghettos, walled off from the rest of the world and guarded for the good of humanity. But the people in the Warrens are kept drugged and fattened like cattle in pens. And the Council of Dragons is not only lying about the source of the magical power that fuels their world, it has devised a new, more productive way to harvest human magical potential.

Wraith, Solander and Jess eventually split and follow individual ways of dealing with terrible injustice in their world. Jess prefers to ignore it. Solander devotes himself to looking for a magical solution. And Wraith decides to hide behind the pen name of a revolutionary, Vincalis, and expose the hypocrisy of the Dragons through plays, first a tragedy, and then a mix of tragedies and comedies...

...but none of them realize that the Dragons have been in power a very long time. They're not about to let anyone think new things, let alone try to change the world.

And no one at all realizes that their actions are leading to a disastrous confrontation that none of them would have wished for.

Vincalis the Agitator is a fascinating cautionary tale that works on many levels. Beyond the social commentary, it reaches a stunning physical and magical climax that very few novels would attempt - and it also rewards in the human dimension. Get a copy and see what a fantasy writer who's not merely imitating can do to expand your world.