Tensions between the Pack –and Kate –and Roland heat up.
Hugh, Roland’s warlord, has come to Atlanta, taken over the People and is now
using them to try and get to Kate. And if he has to go through the Pack to do it,
or the Order of Merciful Aid, or anyone – he will do it.
As the threat of Roland gets ever closer to Atlanta, we
get a sense of just how mighty this man is and how dangerous it is to oppose
him – and Kate worries about leading the Pack, the people she cares about, in a
war against such an overwhelming threat
She has some hard decisions to make and a whole new direction to take in facing off against her immensely powerful father
Epicness!
This book marks a major turning point in the story of
Kate – or rather it brings a transition Kate has been kind of slouching towards
in the last few books to a final and major point. Kate’s secret is out, Kate is
known as the daughter of Roland, everyone knows it and knows it’s a very big
deal
Ok, several people have known that Kate was Roland’s
daughter for some time. But there’s a difference between “she’s the daughter of
Roland the head of the People who re all necromancers” and Kate is the daughter
of Roland, who was once Biblical Nimrod, a being of incredible, legendary,
terrifying power and quite capable of
forming an immense empire, performing feats of magic that are not even
imaginable by anyone else. Yes, we’ve
always had the immensity of Roland lurking in the background as an abstract
force – but now it’s very much present and immediate – and epic.
I can’t really stress the epic enough here because it’s so well done in this book in so many places and in so many ways – and it’s also essential. The whole series changes from this book. Kate and Curran have had their relationship in focus, then the pack in focus and are now moving on to a whole different part of their stories; and part of what makes their choices in this book and especially the astonishing ending of this book work is the presentation of Roland as an epic threat
And not just Roland as an epic threat – but also
establishing that Kate, as Roland’s daughter and an inheritor of a small
percentage of his epicness, as the only viable counter to Roland’s dominance
and, again, shifts the perception of the pack and Kate’s place in it. For a
while there has been the underlying assumption that the Pack provides and army
with which to oppose Roland – which is well and truly shattered in this book. A
combination of the Pack’s continual lack of acceptance of Kate (as well as the
pack’s own internal divisions and dysfunction), of Kate feeling so protective
of the Pack that she is in some ways unable to act as a ruler since she simply
cannot make the hard choices and, ultimately, because Roland is so powerful
that the Pack would less opposing army and more briefly annoying speed bump.
