James Nicoll Reviews

There’s a Light

Ward Against Darkness (Chronicles of a Reluctant Necromancer, volume 2)

By Melanie Card

21 Oct, 2017

**A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction**

3 comments

2013’s Ward Against Darkness is the second volume in Melanie Card’s Chronicles of a Reluctant Necromancer series.

The good news is that Ward De’Ath is spending less time worrying about being outed as a practitioner of the forbidden surgical arts. That’s because he is facing a far more immediate problem: a band of highly motivated assassins want to kill Ward and his dead…ish companion Celia.

Ward and Celia manage to elude their hunters and head for a wilderness that might just be wild enough to hide them. There’s just one catch.

I’d Just Want Your Heart

Ward Against Death (Chronicles of a Reluctant Necromancer, volume 1)

By Melanie Card

24 Feb, 2017

**A Year of Waterloo Region Speculative Fiction**

0 comments

2011’s Ward Against Death is the first volume in Melanie Card’s Chronicles of a Reluctant Necromancer.

The meet-cute between Ward De’Ath and Celia Carlyle is an unpromising one. He is a branded criminal (thanks to his interest in the unsavoury surgical arts¹); she is the daughter of a lord. Not only that, but when they first meet, Celia is quite dead.

Still, love will find a way. And if love doesn’t, necromancy definitely can.