Black Jewels Trilogy

For the 2012 blogging from A to Z challenge, I'm writing to the theme of book series that I love. Mostly science fiction and fantasy, with a few others thrown in.

Black Jewels Trilogy by Anne Bishop. I first came upon this series when I was a teenager. The cover to the right is from the original mass market paperback. They've had several rebrandings with new cover art, an omnibus edition, and a whole trail of stories spun from the same world, but I've never read beyond the original trilogy and perhaps one or two short stories set in the world.

Daughter of the Blood introduced us to a dark and glittering second-world fantasy landscape with heroes who are as ruthless as they are deep dreamers. Their world has become corrupted. A matriarchal society ravished by greed has become a cruel parody of itself. Into this is born Witch; she is, as the novel puts it, dreams made flesh. The novel follows the rise of Witch and the decay of the world as well as the three strongest dreamers, Warlord Princes by the names of Daemon, Lucivar, and Saeton SaDiablo the High Lord of Hell.

It's not a sunshine and daisies kind of series.

But it's not all dark and brooding either.There are moments when you gasp, moments when you cheer and moments when you laugh aloud.

I gave the first book to my best friend to read when she was taking a plane ride to go visit family in Florida for a week. She finished the book quickly and spent the rest of the week wishing she had the second one -- there was a local book shop, but at this time the series had just come to print and Anne Bishop wasn't all that well known, so they didn't carry any of her work. Also, it was before the time of instant download and e-reading. So she returned home, yelled at me for letting her go away with the first book and no access to the second, then promptly took the second book from my shelf and went home to read it.

The series starts with Daughter of the Blood, book two is Heir to the Shadows, and it concludes with Queen of the Darkness (new style cover to the left).

My friend and I talked about the series so much that all our friends wanted to read it. I think at last count, my copy of Daughter of the Blood had been read 26 times by myself and my friends. My copy of Queen of Darkness however, has never been borrowed because by that point, all of my friends wanted their own copy of the series!