The One-Armed Queen

Jane Yolen is one of America's most acclaimed authors. As an editor and poet, and an author of nonfiction and of children's, young-adult, and adult novels and stories, she has published more than 150 books and has won the Caldecott Medal, the World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award, the Kerlan Award, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is widely considered the 20th-century Hans Christian Andersen. Yolen has also created one of the greatest and most important high fantasy series, the Chronicles of Great Alta, which in its breadth and depth achieves not only the status of literature, but like Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the stature and endurance of myth.

In the late 1980s, Yolen produced the first and second volumes of the Chronicles of Great Alta, Sister Light, Sister Dark and White Jenna (also available in the single-volume The Books of Great Alta). Now she has written a self-contained sequel, The One-Armed Queen, which can be enjoyed by both fans and newcomers, by both its intended adult audience and by young-adult readers.

The One-Armed Queen returns to the world of the Dales many years after the warrior queen Jenna has defeated the Dales's great enemy, the kingdom of Garun. Queen Jenna's consort, King Carum, may be dying. Jenna's heir, her adopted daughter Scillia, is in constant conflict with her mother and her role. Jenna's first-born son, the ambitious prince Jemson, believes himself the rightful ruler. And the Garunians will exploit every weakness when they return, bent on conquest of the Dales and destruction of the hated Queen and Goddess. --Cynthia Ward