I remember well my first encounter with KJA book. I was a very new Star Wars fan who hadn't read anything more than the Thrawn trilogy and while waiting for my aunt to arrive one weekend, I read a book blurb that claimed Luke Skywalker was in a coma and a Dark Lord of the Sith was running amok. I immediately bought it (and realized later that I should really have read the first two books in the series) just because I appreciated an author with the audacity to go in a less conventional direction.
This is a slightly odd way to introduce my review, but I feel it's relevant. Spine of the Dragon was sent to me in the form of an ARC and I devoured it. It is his return to epic fantasy and clearly demonstrates that this format does not cheat the reader of the things I've enjoyed about his other works. (In addition to Star Wars, he's written compelling stories in the Dune universe as well as a great read called The Dark Between the Stars. But that's another topic.)
The best way to explain this first book in his exciting new series is to ask you to imagine a world in which, during Greco-Roman conflicts, the Olympian gods and all their wacky offspring turned out to be not so much a thing of the past as we thought. That automatically hooked me as a "we've got bigger problems than our national agendas, but it's not simple to reconcile those." It tells the stories of characters ranging from a besotted prince to a disgraced sorcerer-turned-miner, so that we are all invested in the various levels of these societies. The war descriptions do not lack for intensity, but are crafted to demonstrate different priorities and strategies.
Something that struck me enough that I actually mentioned it to my straight-laced mother is that yes, the married people get conjugal, but in his best moments, Kevin writes it with attention to intimacy instead of physicality. I have been looking for books that are able to convey that after many years of cringing through George R.R. Martin's interpretation of how all physical relations work.
I won't say more about the plot, but definitely encourage people to go out and give this a try because I want other people to discuss it with!
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250302106
