Amazon.com Review
Crispin Kateralbin is an outsider, and no matter how hard he tries, he cannot find a place to fit in. Expelled from his circus home after his carelessness causes a death, he first wanders and then flees across the crumbling Ferupian Empire into daemon-infested Raw. He acquires a companion, Rae, who was born in Kirekune (with whom Ferupe has been at war for 100 years), and who is also an exile, excluded forever from belonging anywhere by the lengths she has gone to for acceptance. Their world is fantastically dark, warlike, and corrupt, and the visions Crispin has of a city destroyed by holocaust suggest that the end is near. Separated from Rae in Pilkinson's Shadowtown, Crispin goes on without her, transferring his allegiance to the Ferupian Air Force and its daemon-powered planes, but there, too, he is an outsider, despite his flying skill.
Ever ends without resolution. The journeys (inner and outer) that Felicity Savage depicts are interesting, but incomplete. Savage's writing is rough, sometimes overdone, and Crispin's episodic life seems to have little effect on him; although he is the central character, we do not know much more about him at the end than we did at the beginning. Savage leaves plenty of hints and loose ends for another volume or two, and Crispin's story is by no means whole, so the ultimate quality of this book depends entirely on what follows.
From Kirkus Reviews
First installment of a fantasy trilogy, from the author of the mass market Delta City (1996), etc. Captive daemons, cruelly confined and tortured, produce the motive power for vehicles and machines in Savage's oddball world. Ferupe, with its dying Queen Lithrea the Second, is at war with neighboring Kirekune, whose tailed inhabitants are ruled by the Lizard Significant. Young half- breed Crispin, forced to depart his circus home after a fatal accident, faces prejudice (he's tall and black) as he seeks work and shelter. He meets Rae, a young Kirekunian woman who has cut off her tail to become inconspicuous among the Ferupians. After various adventures, they find themselves in the Waste--a borderland where, in their flimsy daemon-powered aircraft, the two opposing air forces battle it out. Eventually, the pair are captured by Ferupian soldiers, accused of spying, and imprisoned. Crispin, thinking Rae dead, becomes a pilot; Rae, thinking Crispin dead, becomes priestess Rain. As Ferupe begins to lose the war, Crispin naively collaborates in a plot to kill a superior officer and is forced to flee for his life. Noisy, chaotic, not even half thought out: an unconvincing grab-bag of an opener. --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
