Recent reads

Bhagavati : Blood of the Goddess, by Kara Dalkey. Dalkey brings her historical fantasy to a dramatic close with a climactic battle and a multitude of revelations and betrayals. The identity of the Goddess whose miracle-working blood has led English herbalist Thomas Chinnery and others to the hidden city of Bhagavati is finally unequivocably revealed, after being hinted at in the prior volume. Along the way, Dalkey indirectly addresses the effect of extraordinary power on both the wielder of the power and those over which it is wielded. In the course of winding up her exotic trilogy, Dalkey, like Tolkien and Peake, brings matters to a violently dramatic climax only to have a key character renounce the fruit of his extraordinary adventures and very deliberately return to a wholly mundane existence. One can almost imagine that the last line of the book could very well have been cribbed from Sam Gamgee's prosaicly respectable "Well, I'm home."