7.4 /10 1 Votes7.4
6.5/10 Pages 384 pp Originally published 13 November 2014 Genre Urban fantasy | 4.2/5 ISBN 978-0575132504 Followed by The Hanging Tree | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Publication date 13 November 2014 (2014-11-13) Similar Ben Aaronovitch books, Urban fantasy books, Paranormal books |
Ben aaronovitch discusses foxglove summer
Foxglove Summer is the fifth novel in the Rivers of London series by English author Ben Aaronovitch, published 2014 by Gollancz.
Contents
- Ben aaronovitch discusses foxglove summer
- Five reasons to read foxglove summer with ben aaronovitch
- Returning characters
- Characters Introduced in this Novel
- References
The protagonist Peter Grant is left shaken by the developments at the end of the previous book, the sudden betrayal and defection by a highly valued colleague to whom Grant also had a strong emotional tie. The moping Grant welcomes the chance to leave the familiar grounds of London and travel to rural Herefordshire, where the disappearance of two eleven-year old girls is a media sensation, the focus of an intensive police search - and might have grave magical implications as well.
Grant finds that the tangle of marital and extra-marital relations in a small rural community is not only a matter for gossip, but bears very serious criminal implications, and some supernatural ones as well. He meets with a retired wizard, traumatized by the secret magical battles of World War II, and with the wizard's granddaughter who has a very special affinity with bees. Grant gets into intensive contact with Beverley Brook, the goddess or Genius loci of a tributary of the Thames - and learns by personal experience just how rivers gain such gods. He finds that unicorns are all too real and that their horns are deadly weapons; that fairies do exist and even in the 21st century they do sometimes kidnap human children and replace them with changelings; and he meets with a real-life faerie queen, very different from the one imagined by Spenser.
As the ultimate result of all that, Grant faces the prospect of being stuck forever as a captive in the real-life fairyland - an alternative reality or Otherworld where Britain is still covered with a massive unbroken primeval forest, with no sign of the familiar towns and villages. Grant's single, slender hope of escape lies in the lasting magical (or possibly anti-magical) effect of the Roman Empire's engineering projects and of the Romans' habit of imposing themselves on the landscape and building "roads straight as an arrow" wherever they ruled.