The Poison Throne (The Moorehawke Trilogy #1) – Celine Kiernan
Allen & Unwin, 2009
468 pages
RRP: AU$19.99
ISBN: 978-1-74175-868-9

Reviewed by Liz Grzyb

The Poison Throne is the beginning of a fantastic (in all senses of the word) trilogy from Celine Kiernan. It follows fifteen-year-old Wynter Moorehawke, an apprentice carpenter and daughter of Lord Protector Lorcan Moorehawke. The story starts as Wynter and Lorcan return from a five-year sojourn in the Northlands at the king’s request.

As soon as they arrive back to their home court, they can see things aren’t the same. Crown Prince Alberon, Wynter’s childhood playmate, is nowhere to be found and King Jonathan is engineering to promote his bastard son Razi as heir. The court cats have been poisoned, and the ghosts which wander the halls are no longer allowed to be spoken about. Razi, who was like a brother to Wynter, is strangely distant. As they settle in, more intrigue and drama unfolds as Wynter finds out the consequences of what has taken place during their absence.

The Poison Throne takes place in “a fantastical medieval Europe”, with references to the Moroccos, Italy and cold Northlands. King Jonathan’s court is typical fantasy: huge with many rooms, dungeons and of course, secret passages.

Wynter herself is a protagonist it is easy to read along with. She is young and deals with the confusion and intrigue in a believable way. She is obviously used to Court life which makes her seem older than she is and gives her an edge when dealing with subterfuge, but she also shows some of the emotional reactions which place her in the teenage mindset.

One of the elements I really liked about this story was that Kiernan gave her characters time to prepare and (in most cases) recover a little from events before throwing something else at them. Something that annoys me greatly in fantasy is when the protagonist forced to race from one drama to the next without time to eat, wash or sleep. It may not seem like much, but this trivial aspect helped create the world of the court much more clearly as we saw how the characters incorporated the intrigue in their daily lives as well as in times of extreme stress.

The pacing is a little slow to get going, but once past the exposition, the story really picked up pace. By the end of this novel I was wishing I had the second installment in the series, The Crowded Shadows, sitting there waiting for me to get started right away.

Based on the first novel, young adult and older readers of high fantasy will enjoy this trilogy. It is well-written, generally well-paced and tells an interesting story.