British Series Research Articles

Adventures between TV and film, and between Britain and America

This article explores the connections and distinctions between cinema and TV, and between the screen cultures of Britain and the USA, in British spy and detective adventure fictions of the 1960s. One such connection is the sites where films and TV series were made. Many British television adventure series of the 1960s were filmed at the same production facilities as British cinema, such as at Pinewood or at British National Studios in Elstree, near London. A second connection is that those studios’ soundstages and backlot buildings were used to represent international locations, because the export of cinema and television fiction from the UK to the USA centred on representations of international modernity, fashion and adventure. The style of 1960s adventure depended on the resources of Pinewood studios, where James Bond films were made, or the sets built at Elstree which provided simulated foreign locales for the TV adventure series The Saint, The Avengers, The Champions and Department S, for example. Each of these TV series was exported to the USA, and at the same time, American finance was used to begin the cycle of James Bond films, beginning with Dr No in 1962, which were made in British studios and also in Jamaica (a British territory). The Bond films’ spy adventures in exotic settings shared aesthetic features with TV spy and detective narratives, partly because of these similar uses of places and production facilities. The article shows how the distinctions between TV and cinema were blurred in the strange story of how James Bond first appeared on screen. It was in an American TV drama, rather than a British cinema film, and some of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels derived from ideas developed for a planned American television series.

Against interactivity. Phenomenological notes on Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

Interactive cinema is one of the most interesting areas of experimentation with storytelling form. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), a stand-alone episode of the acclaimed British television series available on Netflix, has restarted the debate around this genre. This article offers a discussion of several critical elements inherent to the experience of viewing Bandersnatch, specifically those related to its interactive, meta-reflexive, and ludic character. The tension between interactive and interpretative cooperation, between actuality and virtuality, between self-reflexivity and self-referentiality, between free choice and control, between co-authorship and authority, and between gaming and gambling, bring out the contradictions of a product characteristic of the current transmedial landscape.

Iconographies of the present. Political populism, economic instability and migratory crisis in «Years and Years» (BBC and HBO, 2019)

In its six episodes, the British series Years and Years (2019) calls on images that resonate in the collective imagination of the contemporary media, although some of them have their roots in visual motifs with a strong tradition in Western visual culture. In this article, we attempt to identify these images, representing the political conflicts, social tensions, ecological disasters, and economic uncertainties of the end of the 2010s and beginning of the 2020s, and analyse their transfer from the media to television fiction. Among the references and other motifs analysed are images from the realm of contemporary photography appearing in the press and, for example, at the prestigious World Press Photo event. But an earlier pictorial and cinematographic tradition shows the survival of these visual motifs in the images from Years and Years, interweaving the public sphere with television fiction. Methodologically, we draw on contemporary image theory, including the legacy of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, and textual analysis rooted in semiotics. The visual motifs analysed crystallise around the social unease and humanitarian disasters unleashed by economic and migratory crises, the banalisation of politics in the media, the threat of authoritarian populism and the stylisation of images of war. They include the allegory of freedom and representations of popular revolt and hard times.

Comparative analysis of the broadcaster’s Twitter strategies of the highest-rated British and Spanish TV series

The current interrelation between social media and the audio-visual industry has required traditional broadcasters to extend their programming strategies outside the box. TV fiction is a suitable genre to test new forms of audience loyalty, which is essential in a highly competitive environment. In this article, we present results regarding the actions of the industry through a content analysis of the official Twitter profiles of the most-watched series in Spain and the United Kingdom. We conclude that both market strategies revolve around the linear broadcast. However, Spanish channels are more aggressive in their actions to stimulate social conversation.

Italy’s ragioniere? The national and international relevance of Ugo Fantozzi

Ugo Fantozzi was given life by author and actor Paolo Villaggio in the late 1960s. Inarguably a staple figure within Italian comedy and society, this character remains relevant in modern-day society despite the last film being released in 1999. The Italianità of the Fantozzi series, partially based on people from Villaggio’s life, is unmistakeable. In this article, the Fantozzi films are analysed to show how Fantozzi can be considered so uniquely Italian through many of the themes, dialogue and references to society and culture, yet, at the same time, a universal comedic figure who shares many traits with very well-known and well-regarded British and American television comedy series. Fantozzi, however, never made it to English-speaking shores. While it is likely we will never know the success the franchise could have had, this article shows that it had every possibility of being a success.

The image of the father in Downton Abbey: manifestation of identity in virtuous actions

The British television series Downton Abbey (directed by Julian Fellowes) could be considered a media phenomenon without precedent. Since its release in 2010 and throughout its six seasons, it reached a global audience in over 220 countries. At a time when the father figure is dissolving, fading, or missing in the content of television series, the worldwide success of Downton Abbey features the image of Lord Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), Earl of Grantham, the father of an aristocratic family in England. This article will analyze paternal image from its ontological and historical roots, considering truth, transcendence and goodness, as well as manifestations of paternal virtues. Given the fact that virtue is not easily measured, the analysis will show that a father's identity can be reflected in a series of virtuous actions, as manifestations of core virtues. These virtues are the basis for a quantitative content analysis of the seven episodes of the first season, through the application of a methodological tool for audiovisual analysis.

Trans* Thinking in Irish Television and Film

: This article begins with an analysis of the six-episode British television series Hit & Miss (2012) before moving back in time to a discussion of the films The Crying Game (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005). Though seemingly counterintuitive, the article progresses in this fashion because, as a television show, Hit & Miss is afforded more space for developing trans characterization than is either of the films. In other words, the fuller conception of trans* thinking on offer in Hit & Miss provides a set piece, a lens whereby to reconsider the two films in more robust trans* terms than would otherwise be possible when just considering the films on their own. In particular, their comparative analysis with Hit & Miss helps draw out the manner in which The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto link trans* with decolonization. After the discussion of the two films, the article demonstrates that the trans* thinking outlined in Hit & Miss, The Crying Game, and Breakfast on Pluto can be furthermore mapped onto the first two seasons of Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls (2018–2019), which is not a trans show, as such, but rather a trans* show. All four texts—Hit & Miss, The Crying Game, Breakfast on Pluto, and Derry Girls—feature Irish-British colonial antagonisms framed by a trans* narrative that unfolds in the United Kingdom rather than the Republic of Ireland. These four texts stage a shared gender performance that has decolonization as its end goal.

Early British Drama in Manuscript ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill

Reviewed by: Early British Drama in Manuscript ed. by Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill Jonathan Walker Keywords Manuscript studies, drama, theater, medieval, early modern Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill, eds. Early British Drama in Manuscript. British Manuscripts series. Brepols, 2019. xvi + 376 pp. €100.00 (cl). ISBN: 978-2-503-57546-9, e-ISBN: 978-2-503-57547-6. In a collection of twenty-one essays devoted to early British dramatic manuscripts, one would expect to find discussions that address familiar debates about early plays, introduce newly examined manuscripts related to the drama and theater, offer both theoretical and material considerations of these documents, and detail advances in the technological study of manuscript plays. Early British Drama in Manuscript commendably performs all of these tasks. Editors Tamara Atkin and Laura Estill sequence the essays’ [End Page 185] subject matter in “roughly chronological order” (8) within each of the book’s three sections: “Production” (textual, not theatrical), “Performance,” and “Reception.” Following the editors’ introduction, Joe Stadolnik opens the volume by examining the Brome Abraham and Isaac as an example of “Impersonal Compilation,” arguing that the aesthetic care with which the scribe copied the pageant play into the miscellany indicates a common practice of individuals enjoying drama as readers and not strictly as spectators. In “The Coventry Playbooks,” Pamela M. King “presents a codicological description of the two Weavers’ manuscripts”—containing the Presentation of the Virgin and Christ’s Debate with the Doctors in the Temple—and offers “a consideration of how radically different as a manuscript and functional material object a working playbook is from the other compilations of plays received as ‘medieval English drama’ ” (34). Alexandra F. Johnston offers a compelling new study of the Towneley Plays, which fundamentally reclassifies and redates the manuscript as a legal document from the 1560s rather than as a “deluxe production” (60) designed to emphasize literary significance. By positioning its codicological and paleographical features within the broader religious and political reforms occurring in the first decade of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, Johnston makes a persuasive case that the manuscript’s provenance involves the enforcement of ecclesiastical orthodoxy in a region with strong recusant sympathies. Meticulously overturning a prominent theory about the textual transmission and revision of the late sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century witnesses of the Chester cycle, Matthew Sergi argues that the lost exemplar for these manuscripts very likely dates to the late fifteenth century, but he also argues that a radical unknowability resides at the center of our debates about such early texts. The implication seems to be that embracing this unknowability, instead of treating it as the problem we must inflexibly solve, in fact reinforces the rigor with which we make our historical claims. Kirsten Inglis and Mary Polito offer a comparative analysis of the manuscript play Baiazet (ca. 1619) and its revised and printed counterpart The Raging Turke (1631) by Thomas Goffe, examining the methods by which a team of ten note-takers recorded a specific performance of the play at Oxford [End Page 186] and then synthesized the notes into a coherent text. In revisiting theories of playscript abridgement, memorial reconstruction, and touring with reduced troupes, James Purkis examines the John of Bordeaux manuscript (ca. 1592) to demonstrate that multiple theories of working play-text production might easily coexist within the same witness, an argument that joins a growing chorus of scholars offering a welcome corrective to some of the monolithic categories that have continued to ossify since the New Bibliography. William Proctor Williams provides the last essay in the “Production” section, discussing thirteen autograph plays and classical dramatic translations in manuscript by James Compton and Cosmo Manuche, who seem to have written them largely during the Interregnum, some of which focus on Royalist themes. In addition to furnishing brief biographies of the two amateur playwrights and details about the loss and recovery of these documents, Williams reads textual variants in the duplicate copies of The Banished Shepherdess and The Feast to argue that the manuscripts reveal traces of private Interregnum performances that are attuned to very different audiences and milieux. By considering specific features of the manuscript that contains the only extant copy of John Redford...

Black Mirrors

Reflections on mimesis have tended to be restricted to aesthetic fictions in the past century; yet the proliferation of new digital technologies in the present century is currently generating virtual simulations that increasingly blur the line between aesthetic representations and embodied realities. Building on a recent mimetic turn, or re-turn of mimesis in critical theory, this paper focuses on the British science fiction television series, Black Mirror (2011–2018) to reflect critically on the hypermimetic impact of new digital technologies on the formation and transformation of subjectivity.

Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom by Sangu Mandanna

Reviewed by: Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom by Sangu Mandanna Fiona Hartley-Kroeger Mandanna, Sangu Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom. Viking, 2021 [352 p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593206973 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593206997 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-6 Eleven-year-old Kiki Kallira used to be a "sunshine girl," but these days, the only thing that calms her anxiety is drawing her own fabulous version of the Kingdom of Mysore, inspired by stories of her relatives and ancestors back in India and the myth of the goddess Chamundeshwari's battle with the demon lord Mahishasura. When her fictional heroine Ashwini pursues a demon through a rip in the sketchbook into everyday London, Ashwini explains that Mahishasura turned Kiki's obsessive fictional drawing into a real pocket universe, and only Kiki can vanquish him. Into the sketchbook they go, and soon Kiki's hanging out with a group of child resistance fighters, but vanquishing a demon lord—even if it means destroying the world she created—is every bit as scary and complicated as she could imagine. Kiki's Mysore is full of wonderful architectural details, from magnificent palaces to the caretaking Crow House, while Kiki realizes the weight of the burdens she's placed on her fictional friends and the extent to which anxiety has taken over her own life. Ashwini helps her begin to think of anxiety as an illness rather than a fundamental personal flaw, a distinction readers will appreciate, and one that enables Kiki to reclaim her agency. This opening title in British author Mandanna's first middle grade series will suit fans of Rick Riordan Presents titles, while the focus on Kiki's artistry and anxiety will appeal to readers eager for a heroine who proves that the pen (or drawing pencil) is mightier than the sword (or demon lord). Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Some psychoanalytic reflections: femininity, feminism and fantasy in “APPLE TREE YARD”

This paper examines the interplay between femininity, feminism, and fantasy, based on the analysis of the protagonist of Apple Tree Yard, a British television mini series (2017) adapted by Amanda Coe from the novel of the same name by Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013). This examination addresses the following questions: What causes a married, 52-year-old woman, with two grown children to engage in a reckless and perverse affair with a man she does not know? What unconscious fantasies have been evoked by the traumas of her childhood and of her adult life, and how do these unconscious fantasies encroach upon her external reality?

‘On the programme tonight’

British popular music television series The Old Grey Whistle Test (OGWT) was a regular feature on BBC2 between 1971 and 1987. The show enjoyed its greatest popularity during the early 1970s when, as a programme synonymous with the term album-orientated rock (AOR), it was responsible for introducing British popular music audiences to a different range of music than was generally featured on national television and radio at the time. Despite its iconic and relatively unique status during the early 1970s, however, little has been written about OGWT. The purpose of this article is to examine and assess the significance of OGWT in terms of its critical role as a tastemaker for British AOR audiences during an era where opportunities to listen to AOR on British television and radio were limited. The article also considers the legacy of OGWT in the digital age where its significant archival footprint on YouTube has given the show a renewed level of importance as a comprehensive retrospective guide to the AOR music of the early 1970s.

Gender in British media: homosexuality and masculinity in selected TV series

The interaction between masculinity and homosexuality is of interest when considering Connell’s structure of gender power relations. Here gay men are considered subordinate to heterosexual ones, thus linking them to femininity. To fight the attributions of femininity, gay men have adopted a wide range of strategies all centred around hyper-masculinity and adherence to upper social classes, which carry the promise of power. The role of media is pivotal in shaping this imagery. It is our aim to analyse two British TV series portraying gay characters in order to uncover the identities, which may shape the perception of viewers. Furthermore, the two series are compared in regard to three aspects: hedonism, effeminacy and promiscuity. The methodology draws from Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and the feminist film of Laura Mulvey. Due to the constricted nature of TV series, it also includes theory of Marcel Danesi. The outcomes suggest that there is a shift in the portrayal of gay masculinities towards greater conservativism. The comparison also uncovered that promiscuity is still portrayed as widely accepted in the gay community, whereas positions of effeminacy and hedonism have changed. It must be pointed out that such portrayal may be motivated by the presence of the series within heteronormative mainstream media.Keywords: homosexuality, media, television, masculinity, hegemony, men.

Heroic affect and structures of national feeling on British television: 1990s Sharpe vs. 2010s The Last Kingdom

This article uses the affective and affecting concept of the hero to trace the structures of national feeling in two British television series: Sharpe (ITV 1993–97) and The Last Kingdom (BBC 2015–17). Both series are adaptations of military historical fiction by the bestselling author Bernard Cornwell but were created in and for two different periods in the United Kingdom. Television drama articulates the anxieties, hopes and needs of the time when it is produced. Its multimodal medium enables complex affective arrangements of (heroic) character, plot, genre conventions and televisual style. The article shows that Sharpe and The Last Kingdom present occasions for the viewers to perceive their hero characters as affective constructs, and it asks whether the hero affect is linked to an equally affective conception of nationhood. When viewed through the lens of the heroic, the series indicate a shift in structures of national feeling between the 1990s and the 2010s. Sharpe invited its contemporary viewers to perceive the titular character as heroic, but the aesthetic arrangement in which the character predominantly appears is that of the swashbuckler genre with a focus on stirring adventure; the hero affect is dissociated from an affective concept of nationhood. By contrast, The Last Kingdom links its hero to the nation in a highly affective and affecting manner, and its aesthetic arrangement draws considerably on the conventions of epic, a genre of national significance and the aesthetics of the sublime.

Discovering new dimensions: Affect and the heroic in Doctor Who

The British television series Doctor Who often depicts the discovery of new dimensions that provoke both affective experiences and heroic moments. Every discovery of a new dimension in Doctor Who is overwhelming, sudden and transformative, a moment of wonder and inspiration. This article considers three episodes, featuring discoveries of a new dimension of space (‘The Rings of Akhaten’ 2013), agency (‘Dark Water’ 2014) and imagination (‘Vincent and the Doctor’ 2010), which all combine affect and the heroic, albeit in different ways. Acknowledging the difficulty of grasping moments of affecting and being affected due to their dynamic and pre-reflexive nature, the article uses close readings of selected scenes to narrow down the descriptive gap as far as possible. The case study of ‘Dark Water’ also includes an analysis of the episode’s reception in reviews and on social media platforms to highlight the actual affective response of the audience. The episodes’ narratives of discovering new dimensions of space, agency and imagination, medialized through specific audio-visual means, closely intertwine affective experiences with heroic moments: affective experiences can trigger heroic action, a heroic claim of agency can have an affective dimension and the ability to affect and be affected can in itself be heroized.

A corpus analysis on the language on TV series

The purpose of the present study is to find out the extent to which the real spoken language is reflected in TV series in terms of vocabulary. In accordance with this purpose, a corpus was compiled using scripts from two British TV series, and it was compared with the spoken part of the British National Corpus in order to find out whether there is a relationship between two corpora. The results showed that the TV series corpus covered the 98.54% of the most frequent lemmas in the spoken part of the British National Corpus, so the language used in TV series reflects the language spoken in the real life in terms of the vocabulary items and their frequency. Accordingly, it can be claimed that TV series can be used as effective in-class and extra-curricular materials for teaching vocabulary and speaking and listening skills. Â Â

Peer review at the Ministry of Silly Walks

BackgroundFifty years ago, the groundbreaking British sketch series Monty Python’s Flying Circus premiered on BBC One and forever changed the world of comedy. The humour transcended mere absurdity by poking a subversive finger in the eye of buttoned-up British society. Here, we commemorate this cultural milestone and simultaneously call attention to an emerging concept in the health sciences, termed simplified peer review. The union of these disparate subjects motivates a formal gait analysis based on one of the troupe’s most iconic sketches, “The Ministry of Silly Walks”, a satire of bureaucratic inefficiency. Research questionThe sketch portrays peer review as exceedingly efficient, lasting all of 20 s. But was it fair? The answer depends on how one measures silliness. If silly walking can be defined as deviations from typical walking, then it can be quantified using video-based gait analysis. MethodsTo assess the quality of peer review at the Ministry of Silly Walks, we measured knee flexion in the sagittal plane of motion and calculated the Gait Variable Score (GVS) for three gait cycles, those of the Minister (n = 2) and Mr. Pudey (n = 1), an applicant for a Research Fellowship. ResultsFor the Minister, we found large deviations from typical walking across two gait cycles (GVSknee(1) = 33.6, GVSknee(2) = 23.3), whereas the gait of Mr Pudey produced an intermediate score (GVSknee = 16.3). By this measure, Mr Pudney’s walk is 3.3 times more variable than typical walking, whereas an exemplary silly walk is 6.7 and 4.7 times more variable, respectively, than typical walking. SignificanceOur analysis corroborates the Minister’s assessment: Mr Pudey is a promising applicant and deserving of a Research Fellowship to advance his silly walk. We suggest that the sketch holds special resonance and uncanny prescience for researchers in the health sciences today.

Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850 by Kristina Booker

Reviewed by: Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850 by Kristina Booker Ingrid Tague Kristina Booker. Menials: Domestic Service and the Cultural Transformation of British Society, 1650–1850. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2018. Pp. xi + 195. $95. Debuting just a few years after the Great Recession, the British television series Down-ton Abbey was a huge hit in the U.S. as well as the U.K. Despite our national myth of having escaped from the stifling restrictions of a class-based society, American audiences breathlessly followed the travails of the Granthams and their servants. Part of the appeal of the series was doubtless the way it invited viewers to contrast their enlightened, modern views with those of characters like Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess, who is so out of touch with working life that she does not understand the concept of a weekend. Yet, as Booker notes in a “Coda” to Menials, for all its apparent sympathy for those “downstairs,” the series nonetheless consistently presents the Granthams as enlightened and sympathetic, and punishes servants who resist their place in the social order. Downton Abbey, she suggests, is the heir to a body of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature that portrayed servants for ideological purposes. The “master classes” who produced this literature exploited the figure of the servant to present economic relations in ways that would enable them to retain their position at the top of the social hierarchy. In particular, Booker focuses on three key concepts: self-interest, emulation, and luxury. All three areas have been widely explored by economic and social historians, but Booker argues that fictional representations of servants are particularly useful for understanding what these concepts meant and how attitudes toward them changed over time. The first two chapters, which comprise roughly half the book, deal with self-interest. Booker outlines economic debates about self-interest from the cautious advocacy of seventeenth-century merchants like Edward Misselden and Thomas Mun, through Adam Smith’s celebration of self-interest as a force for economic and social benefit, to the nineteenth-century critiques of it in the works of Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. She then traces these ideas in key literary works, with a particular focus on the ways authors used servants to engage with the potential problems of a world governed by self-interest. Thus, in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, for instance, the titular character provides the opportunity to explore “the tension between one’s own interests and one’s duty to the general good.” Caleb believes that he can serve the greater social good by pursuing his self-interest, but he consistently finds himself oppressed by Falkland, his tyrannical master, who uses his social power to promote only his own interests. In chapter 2, Booker turns to a criticism of self-interest that emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century: the idea that Smithian economic theory was too abstract and failed to account for “the real lives of English men and women, particularly the working classes.” Her example is Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53), which demonstrates the impact of such criticism as Hortense, Lady Dedlock’s maid, suffers from her masters’ treatment of her [End Page 59] as a disposable commodity. While quite beyond Scriblerian’s chronological remit, the discussion is interesting, since what Dickens demonstrates with Hortense’s failed attempt at revenge “is that under the reign of [Smith’s] political economy, a maid with subjectivity is considered dangerous, even less than human.” The Rouncewells are offered as an alternative model where affection and mutual devotion provide both master and servant an opportunity to thrive. Chapter 3, on emulation, traces anxieties about servants’ perceived tendency to emulate their betters. Thus, Richardson’s Pamela is held up as a paragon of virtue because she consistently rejects opportunities to rise above her station, while her virtues themselves are the gift of the mistress who raised and educated her. B’s offers of fine clothes and jewelry are elements of seduction and sin; by rejecting them, Pamela maintains “her adherence to social dictates which she believes are natural and even divinely sanctioned.” In contrast, the character of the...

Authorship and Creative Management in Established British TV

Authorship in television has been a blind spot in television studies, as the concept of the author does not go hand in hand with the collective nature of the production process. Redefining authorship in a collective context, this paper investigates the division of labour in the writing process of the British science fiction series Doctor Who, as well as the power dynamics resulting from symbolic attributions of authorship to specific players, and in particular the showrunner, depending on their reputation. This study shows how production constraints are integrated into the writing process, blurring the lines between writing, which is constructed as authored in British television, and the production process in itself, deemed more technical. Finally, the consequences of perceiving workers as authors, more broadly talents, are explored. It indeed leads to management methods specific to creative workers and to disruptions in the production process, to adapt to “talented” workers’ needs.

Dark Blade by Steve Feasey

Reviewed by: Dark Blade by Steve Feasey April Spisak Feasey, Steve Dark Blade. Bloomsbury, 2020 [352p] (Whispers of the Gods) Paper ed. ISBN 9781408873397 $12.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781408873403 $10.39 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 6-9 In this Norse-inspired fantasy, three young people with wildly different skills become allies against a flood of evil; they are aided in their quest by a complex and memorable witch and a slippery god who eludes clear answers while nudging them toward key discoveries. Lann is learning to share control with his gift from the gods in the form of a sword, Dread Blade, that is astonishingly attuned to destroying monsters (both human and otherwise); Astrid is not a terrific substitute queen but she is ferocious and skilled as a warrior; and Erik, once cleared of regicide, is a born leader. It's a terrific cast of characters, down to the chillingly hollow sociopath of a villain who was already horrifying before he summoned a lich to share his body and aid him in the opening of a monstrous portal. Feasey accomplishes an impressive amount of world building on the sly, leaving a rich understanding of the landscape and cultures of this setting while never slowing down on the exhilarating action. Although there's about as much gore as one would imagine in a novel about a sword that yearns to murder in a land currently beset by monsters, the story stretches to younger fantasy fans, a boon given the relative dearth of complex, high stakes fantasies that aren't exclusively for older teens. Readers will already likely be anticipating [End Page 471] the next volume of this British import series even before they are left with a juicy bit of a lineage revelation to contemplate while they wait. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois