Cobweb Bride
Cobweb Bride, no. 1
Publisher Description
Many are called...
She alone can save the world and become Death's bride.
COBWEB BRIDE (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book One) is a history-flavored fantasy novel with romantic elements of the Persephone myth, about Death's ultimatum to the world.
What if you killed someone and then fell in love with them?
In an alternate Renaissance world, somewhere in an imaginary "pocket" of Europe called the Kingdom of Lethe, Death comes, in the form of a grim Spaniard, to claim his Bride. Until she is found, in a single time-stopping moment all dying stops. There is no relief for the mortally wounded and the terminally ill....
Covered in white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders she lies in the darkness... Her skin is cold as snow... Her eyes frozen... Her gaze, fiercely alive...
While kings and emperors send expeditions to search for a suitable Bride for Death, armies of the undead wage an endless war... A black knight roams the forest at the command of his undead father… Spies and political treacheries abound at the imperial Silver Court.... Murdered lovers find themselves locked in the realm of the living...
Look closer — through the cobweb filaments of her hair and along each strand shine stars...
And one small village girl, Percy—an unwanted, ungainly middle daughter—is faced with the responsibility of granting her dying grandmother the desperate release she needs.
As a result, Percy joins the crowds of other young women of the land in a desperate quest to Death's own mysterious holding in the deepest forests of the North…
And everyone is trying to stop her.
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The ruritanian kingdom of Lethe, nestled between Spain and France, is denied Death's services until he is provided with his Cobweb Bride. Death's absence does not mean freedom from those things that should kill, only from the release of mortality itself. As the mortally sick and grievously injured languish, women from all over Lethe reluctantly offer themselves as Death's bride; unloved Percy is one such volunteer. Not everyone dislikes the deathless state of affairs; the "reeking corpse" of the late Duke Hoarfrost has no intention of abandoning his power merely because he should be dead, and as the migrating brides soon discover, the duke is willing to go to great extremes to keep Death retired. Norilana-owner Nazarian (Mansfield Park and Mummies) writes clean and true prose, but despite Percy's pluck and the laudable zeal with which the grasping duke chews the scenery, the story is a bit too familiar and not especially engaging.
