A video review of Nine Sailed Star and an interview with Glynn by Dr. Alexander Clarke of Naval History Live.
The characters are complex and rounded. It’s the one thing you can always count on in a Glynn Stewart book. Goodness help him and his poor partner and [those] who work with him because Glynn will never produce an unrounded character at any point in any of his books. I mean, seriously.
Every character has, in his mind, worked out a full arc, a full thing of what’s their backstory, everything! It might not feature in the book, but you can tell by the way he treats them in the book. So you might not hear the backstory, but you know they have a backstory. If you ever have a conversation with him, you can soon find out that these characters who show up for maybe a couple of pages still have a backstory…
And it has phrases like this:
“Siblings-in-magic. Thank you for coming.”
Armand Bluestaves looked around the gathering in his dining room and felt a small surge of pride. He hadn’t had a dining room when the diamond observer had decided to show him a possible future.
His magic had allowed him to transform the long-abandoned dining hall back into something entirely passable, even for an Archmage of the Towers of the Great Red Forest. Given the nature of his guests, that was critical—though, of course, the five archmagi attending tonight could guess exactly how much of the place was actually repaired and tell that the decorations were entirely illusory.
Armand was proud of his illusions, though. They were and always had been his greatest skill. Any of the six archmagi in the room could carve a focus or fling a fireball. To conjure the illusions of crackling fires and sumptuous tapestries and make them beautiful took proficiency and art.
– Dr. Alexander Clarke, with excerpt from Nine Sailed Star by Glynn Stewart