Volume 1 in The Ship Kings series. Great fantasy novel set around boats and sailing. If you love the sea you will love this book. ( )

Andrew McGahan is a well respected Australian author with a number of excellent adult books to his credit. (I believe they're excellent, I own a number of them, but I am yet to read any of them, including his Miles Franklin Award winning [The White Earth]. There's probably a special circle of Hell for people who hoard books and, if so, a special area just for me in it.) This is his first foray into young adult literature, a story of a young man destined to be a woodcutter, until one fateful day he sees a ship out to sea and knows that he can never be happy again chopping down trees.

This was a good adventure story, it went places I wasn't expecting and, even though it's nominally young adult, it came across as a very intelligent and grown-up book with a decent level of complexity. Towards the beginning I was a bit grumpy with it, I must admit, because it seemed that McGahan fell into a trap of making his society annoyingly patriarchal because that's what medieval style societies were. (A note to fantasy writers who can't quite get over that trap: it's a fantasy, you can make it whatever you like, you don't have to stick with some outmoded idea of what a fantasy society should be.)

However I should have trusted the author, that wasn't what he was doing at all. Overall, a very good read. ( )