Tanya Huff is one of those authors with expansive bibliographies, mostly in the fantasy genre, that I keep bumping into. She's sold a lot of books but people circulate them so they're easy to acquire second hand. And so I have a bunch, but I haven't read any from my fantasy shelves until now. What I have read are her 'Blood' books, which are on my urban fantasy shelves instead, because they're about a former Canadian cop teaming up with a vampire, illegitimate son of Henry VIII and now successful writer of historical romances, to solve cases. I liked them a lot and the TV adaptation, 'Blood Ties', was an enjoyable show too.

If I'm reading her bibliography properly, this book collects her first two novels into one large but not huge volume. The two novels are 'Child of the Grove' from 1988 and 'The Last Wizard', released a year later. They certainly got her off on the right foot, as the first is good and the second better, so she followed up with a pair of standalone books before the 'Blood' series brought her the success she obviously deserved and she was off and running. She still is.

These are good books, even though the first is a highly unusual one because of how the author chose to build it, across multiple generations as if it was a modern retelling of a time-honoured legend. It certainly feels like it could be, except for the utterly fictional setting. What this means is that I spent much of the book trying to figure out who was the Child of the Grove of the title. I was wrong a lot, but due more to impatience than to falling prey to misdirection. Huff isn't hiding anything. She's just taking her time.

For a while, the Child of the Grove is quite obviously Rael, son of Raen and Milthra, for Raen is the King of Ardhan and Milthra spends most of her time as a silver birch in the Grove. That's because she's the Eldest of the Elders, the first sentient being made by the Mother who emerged from the Darkness to fashion the Earth from her flesh and the seas and rivers from her tears. She's literally older than Death, because that's her younger brother, sired by Chaos. And this is a war novel, because Ardhan has to face a neighbouring kingdom, the ambitious Melac, on the battlefield and Rael is appointed Commander of the Elite.

Except he isn't, because what we might reasonably expect to be the novel itself is just a prologue, even though there was an actual two page prologue before it, labelled as Genesis rather than with a chapter number. It's a long prologue at over seventy pages, but we move on with a leap forward in generations anyway. Rael becomes king and has children and dies and life in Ardhan goes on, Melac safely defeated. Are those spoilers I'm throwing out? I don't think so, if this is a prologue.

So, the Child of the Grove isn't Rael but isn't Tayer either, even though she's a Princess of Ardhan, no fewer than four generations on from Rael, and the focus of our attention once we leap forward. After all, the first place she finds herself is the Grove and there she finds an impossibly beautiful man who calls himself Varkell. The Child of the Grove is the somewhat inevitable result of that meeting and her name is Crystal.

While this is high fantasy of the old school, it isn't an epic novel running an outrageous number of pages. After all, it's only half of this volume, which is finished soon after the five hundred page mark. This first book runs 261 pages on its own, though Crystal isn't born until page 110 and doesn't become an adult until page 118, so she's only the focal point for just over half of it. That still seems odd to me and I wonder if there wasn't an easier way to handle this. Should Rael's story have been book one or maybe a true half of this, with parity in substance? I don't know, but what we get seems odd.

What I will say before I start to attempt the avoidance of real spoilers is that Crystal is taken away from Ardhan at the age of eleven by C'Tal, the centaur, to be trained in what she will need to battle Kraydak, the villain of the piece. He was the true opponent back in Rael's day, not that anyone really knew that because he nurtured his role not as the leader of Melac but as the power behind its throne. And he's a wizard, presumably the Last Wizard of the second novel. Except he isn't, because that's Crystal too. And that's not unfair to point out, because it ought to be on the back cover blurb.

Having stopped thinking of this as a war novel, because it's really a high fantasy, we're then tasked with thinking of it as both, because it's truly a fantasy war novel, with the best part of that the fact that, even in the body proper, it's two novels and two wars in one. It's Ardhan vs. Melac, the rematch. But it's also Crystal vs. Kraydak and that's not the headlining match on the Ardhan vs. Melac card, it's a parallel effort. And that's the point at which I'll stop, because that's really the proper beginning of the novel, even if it happens to take place much further into this novel that I'd normally be comfortable talking about.

I liked this, but that approach did frustrate me somewhat. It's also definitely the work of an author early in her career, because the prose is both good and good enough but also not quite up to the polished standard of an established author. Huff was doing an excellent job with this career opener, but it's clearly still a career opener. That's quite obvious in this presentation because 'Wizard of the Grove' is a step up again.

And that's not to say that there aren't moments here that truly shine, because there are. The first one is the glorious scene when Rael becomes king, even though the true emotion doesn't spring from him but his mother. If the novel as a whole mostly served to demonstrate promise in a new author that could well bear fruit down the road, that scene served to show that that was already happening on occasion.

And so to book two, which I shouldn't talk too much about because it's a sequel and I'm writing about it on the same page as its precedessor. Such is the inherent danger with duologies. What I will say is that Huff clearly learned a lot from 'Child of the Grove', an important novel in her career and, ironically given how many prologues it featured, it kind of counts as a prologue to this one, a much better novel.

It's framed as a quest novel with Crystal teaming up with a pair of brothers on a search for a wizard's tower—they have a map—but it's really a deep character study of a very worthy subject who, it's fair to say, has lost her place in the world. Sure, she saved the kingdom of Ardhan and, by extension, the world, from the evil wizard Kraydak, but she remains a wizard herself and, as she says, "When they see me, they see Kraydak."

Those words are delivered to Lord Death, with whom she begins the novel chatting in a pub in Halda. She's in disguise and he's only visible to her, which makes for a fantastic scene, even before Raulin and Jago burst in from the blizzard outside; the latter close to death in the arms of the former, who's pushed beyond his own limits to reach safety. It falls to Crystal, at Lord Death's invitation, to save Jago and then she's known to all and sundry and everything changes.

The only other thing I'm willing to say, beyond how much I enjoyed the opening scenes, is that Crystal has also discovered that the Seven Goddesses, Milthra's sisters, are part of her, using their own essence to create her and so enable the saving of the world. This was great in book one, when neither she nor we knew that, but it's not so great in this book because some of them want out and she has to figure out how to deal with that.

If 'Child of the Grove' was a deceptively complex novel, 'The Last Wizard' is deceptively simple. Not much happens, really, but it's more focused, more meaningful and, frankly, more engaging. Crystal, after the war with Kraydak, is a worthy character for an exploration, and the companions she's given—not just Raulin and Jago but Lord Death and some other non-humans—are worthy too, both in their own right and for how they affect Crystal.

I'm not going to take this opportunity to dive into Huff's other work yet, because there is so much of it and I have plenty of other runthroughs in progress already and a lot of fantasy on my TBR shelves otherwise, but I'll get there at some point. If she's this good this early and obviously improving, how good must she get? ~~ Hal C F Astell

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