She soon receives news that the king has been poisoned, and her teacher has been taken prisoner due to his knowledge in this area-but when the king dies, suspicion falls on Elanna, forcing her to flee her home. However, once a year she allows herself to sneak away from the palace to visit an old circle of stones, where she spills her blood and witnesses its power to conjure apparitions.Īfter Elanna returns from her latest annual trip to the stones, she goes to the greenhouse but finds it odd that she can’t find her mentor or the deadly mushroom she’s observing as part of her studies. Since she was a child, Elanna has been able to make plants grow simply by touching them and awaken specters from the stones simply by dropping her blood upon them, though she hides these abilities and immerses herself in science instead as witchcraft is strictly forbidden. She’s grateful that he rescued her from life in the unrefined backwater in which she was born and enabled her to be raised in civilization with a proper education, especially since he’s encouraged her desire to study botany.

Instead of having the duke tried and executed, he took his frightened young daughter as a hostage, promising to treat her well-that is, as long as her father remains loyal to king and country, of course.įourteen years later, Elanna has come to love King Antoine like a father and feels that she may even have a stronger relationship with him than his own daughter. The king then placed the weapon against Elanna’s head and accused her father of betraying the crown but, since there was a lack of concrete evidence of wrongdoing, he also declared he would be merciful.

When Elanna was five years old, the royal guard barged into her nursery, murdered her nurse, and brought her to the adults’ interrupted dinner party, where she witnessed King Antoine pointing a gun at her father, the Duke of Caeris. Though I can understand why this new release is often compared to Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale due to its wild magic and the heroine’s connection with nature, it’s not a comparison I would make: The Waking Land does not have the same fairy tale quality as either of these, and in my opinion, it falls far short of both these novels.

The Waking Land, Callie Bates’ debut novel, is the first book in a new epic fantasy trilogy featuring a heroine with conflicting loyalties and the power to wake the land like her ancestors of old, an ability last possessed two hundred years ago.

The Waking Land by Callie Bates