Just buy it and read it – you’ll love it…
Sanctuary opens humorously, with mysteriously missing Christmas cookies and eggnog. Although the protagonist, Roman, explains to us in detail why Santa can’t exist, perhaps he really does, and has made an unexpected visit? (Sadly for St. Nick fans, the explanation is more prosaic…)
Things escalate quickly, however, when a teenage boy, Finn, is found by Roman’s pet critters, the nechist, and asks for sanctuary. Although Roman states at the time that he’s not a Catholic priest, he also notes that asking for sanctuary implies that there is someone chasing you. And sure enough, there are lots of people after Finn, each group nastier than the one before. Luckily, although Roman isn’t a Catholic cleric, he IS the Black Volhv, the priest of Chernobog, the God of Destruction, Darkness and Death. So he’s pretty tough, and it turns out Finn has a bit of power too.
Sanctuary isn’t just about sanctuary, though. There’s the not-so-small matter of the marital tiff between Chernobog and his wife, the goddess Morena. Although they say you never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s marriage, somehow Roman has unwillingly ended up in the middle of that too. His past isn’t a piece of cake either. And then, of course, there’s the fierce and gorgeous Vasylisa…
Technically, Sanctuary, the first in the new Roman’s Chronicles series, is set in the authors’ Kate Daniels world, which is already pretty well developed. But Sanctuary is a very different take on the back-story of that world – much more Slavic/Norse/Pagan than Mesopotamian/Babylonian. So you can easily enjoy Sanctuary even if it has been a long time since you picked up a Kate Daniels book. Or even if you’ve never picked up a Kate Daniels book! There are a few Easter eggs scattered here-and-there for Ilona Andrews aficionados, but nothing that impacts the main story. As always, the authors do a great job of filling in necessary background so subtly that it’s virtually unnoticeable. And if you want even more, there’s a lot of additional info in the back of the book as well.
Finally, I have been amused to find that at some points during Sanctuary, I very much appreciated Timothy Snyder’s Yale web course on Ukrainian history that I watched a while back with my husband. For example, when, towards the end of the book, the authors describe the Vasylisa’s sword as looking like “something that came out of Kievan Russ burial grounds, an artifact from 1,200 years ago, when the Varangian army of Viking mercenaries clashed with Khazars over the control of the fertile Eurasian plains”, I was able to nod my head sagely, and say, “Of course I knew that the Vikings came down the Dnieper river to capture Kiev and establish Kievan Russ. And that they fought more than a battle or two in the process. That was in the sixth lecture…” Which simply highlights the huge amount of effort the author duo of Ilona Andrews put into realistic backgrounds for their stories. Which is something I, for one, really, really appreciate.
Sanctuary is available July 30, and my thanks to the authors, NYLA, and Net Galley for the review copy.
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