An escaped slave is on the run for his life. Meeting a strange woman during his flight from beasts loudly pursuing his body for their next complete meal, Valerik begins a strange but freeing journey to a new world. Terror and release alternatively thread through the subsequent pages, sometimes a bit monotonously and formulaically so, until a new element obliterates the brief frustration. Valerik is growingly attracted to his rescuer, Madryn, a mysterious woman seeking her own freedom from an obviously painful yet vague past. He often catches her looking at him with a familiar and passionate gaze, yet any ensuing parallel response on his part only earns him a scornful look and comment. Who is she seeing in these brief, inflammatory gazes?

Valerik begins to dream of another life, one which at first compellingly attracts him because of its upper aristocracy perspective but which consequently develops into horrific and terrifying scenes. There he will discover Madryn's secret and the plot into which he has unwittingly stepped that may result in the death he so fiercely first escaped.

My advice to the next reader of this fantastic tale is not to give up in first quarter of this book, which might have been edited better for more concise and less repetitive scenes of escape, since the rest of the novel rapidly pulls the reader into a thrilling, page-turning tale of another world. Here Valerek dreams the life of one who has taken up residence within his own psyche and propels him to fulfill the mission of freedom and perhaps revenge he now shares with Madryn.

Although it may initially appear that Madryn becomes the predominant hero of this story, Valerik is a most unusual and satisfying character. The farther he moves from his slavery past, the more he evolves into a skilled, intelligent hero whose perceptions and actions subsequently draw us to a moving conclusion. This author also has a wonderful way of evoking inducing the same reactions experienced by all of the novel's characters, as she describes physical and emotional experiences during both the peaceful and terrifying moments of this dynamic plot. McAbee skillfully eliminates this reader's first hesitations and presents us with a quest to right a grievous wrong and prevent evil from darkening the world of freedom-seeking, passionate-loving individuals.

The slow and dauntingly stark reprieve await your enjoyment and the fulfillment will become your own, as you turn these pages of arrogance, equality and higher vision!