Seasparrow
by Kristin Cashore
High School    Dutton  624 pp.
11/22    9781984816672    $21.99
e-book ed.  9781984816689    $10.99

This fifth of Cashore’s Graceling Realm novels (Grace-ling, rev. 11/08, and sequels) encompasses a sea voyage, a shipwreck, a life-threatening trek across the frozen north, the discovery of a powerful explosive and related national conflict, several survivors of abusive childhoods, a pregnant blue fox, and a few romances. At the center of its eventfulness and its attention to information and imagery related to ships, sailing, and the far north is narrator Hava, Queen Bitterblue’s Graceling half-sister and a handy, multilingual spy. Hava’s Graceling magic is to be able to make herself invisible by blending into the setting, a gift that seems as much a burdensome outcome of a traumatic childhood as it is a useful ability. In amongst the threads and pressures of physical survival, plots and plotting, romance, and care for the blue fox and her kits, Hava begins to understand and resolve some of her own emotional damage. Cashore has included a great deal in this novel; it tends toward the sprawling. But as ever, her colorfully realized world presents readers with serious ideas, both psychological and political, and an appealing warmth in its human relationships—and here, the delight of bumptious, telepathic baby foxes.

From the January/February 2023 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.