The Gathering Storm

The ideal reader for Bridges’s sprawling debut would have a love of Tolstoy and an infatuation with Twilight—perhaps an improbable combination. Determination is certainly required to track the mutable Russian proper names and family connections of an enormous cast, all of which must be understood to follow the plot. Katerina is a young duchess in an alternate-universe czarist Russia, a corrupt society secretly governed by Dark and Light Faerie courts. Katerina is an unwilling necromancer, able to raise the dead, a secret she has kept from everyone until a threat to the czarevitch, Nicholas, forces her to act and thereby reveal herself to the Montenegrins, rumored to be witches and worse. All of that is before the vampires and bogatyr (a powerful warrior-czar) come into the picture—it requires every bit of the book’s 400 pages to lay out the relationships, politics, and myth that will drive the rest of the planned trilogy. Bridges is up to the task, though, and for readers who appreciate a challenge, she delivers an imaginative, complex blend of history and magic. Ages 12–up. Agent: Ethan Ellenberg Agency. (Jan.)