Join Thetford author Dean Whitlock over Zoom as he reads from the Carver’s World series, to be released as a boxed set next month. The audience will vote to choose which book in the trilogy Dean reads from! See below for blurbs about each book. Dean will also give a sneak preview of his forthcoming novel, The Bell Cannon. To sign up and get the Zoom link, please email librarians@thetfordlibrary.org.

Carver’s World: the Compelling Fantasy Triptych
Three friends are drawn together by one’s misfortune, but each has wrongs to right and a story to tell.

Sky Carver: Carver, a talented self-taught sculptor in wood, is trapped in the shadow of his father’s painterly genius and his mother’s rough talent as a seer. Though they are long gone downriver, presumed dead, Carver is forced to follow his father’s trade, until he suddenly shows rare talent as a weather mage. Befriended by a bemagicked girl in raven form and bond boy tending fire on a cruel baron’s steamboat, he travels downriver in search of a mentor. Fleeing the baron, they hide among outcasts in a city of filthy canals and spewing workhouses, where mages are hunted and magic refuses to work. Finally, lured by a living picture, they arrive at the magic apparatus of the great mage Krimm. There, Carver must confront the enchantments of the mage and the images of his missing parents to save his friends and choose the best use for all his talents.

Raven: Hardly a year since meeting Carver – and four long years since running away from cruel Baron Cutter – Raven risks recapture to return to Cutter’s estate. She’s an experienced bird mage now, but the memory of her escape haunts her. Did her mother abandon her that night, or did Raven desert her mother in her hour of need? What she discovers rekindles a buried rage and confronts her with two bad options: keep running away or help the mother who’s as strong-willed and sharp-tongued as she is, and has just born the baron’s heir. With unexpected and often clumsy help from Fireboy’s impetuous little brother, aptly nicknamed Hero, Raven must outsmart the minions of two Barons, cross wild highlands booby-trapped with magic, and learn to control her own erratic talent and temper on an unwanted quest, finally looking beyond magic – and herself – to save what is most important.

Fireboy: After a hard year working on the stinking canals of Dunsgow, Fireboy’s skill with steamboats has earned him barely half the money he needs to pay off his mother’s bond. Only then can he reunite his family on the clean waters of the River Slow. A chance meeting with a seer inspires him to gamble everything by hauling a cargo for Baron Miner – who holds his mother’s bond – a chance to free her in one trip. With a wily juggler and a half-human water sprite as unlikely companions, Fireboy journeys to the tangled, bemagicked rapids of the highest reach of the land. Caught between the mind-binding spells of a demented mage and the binding lies in the Baron’s campaign to destroy magic on the Five Rivers, Fireboy desperately risks losing his new friends and his own free will, unless he can discover which bonds really matter.