Review: The Shattered Truce

Donna Brown, The Shattered Truce (Starling Wood Press 2024)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/219475967-the-shattered-truce?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_19

A psychological olde-world tale of three families, a witch and a dragon

Ebba and Hilda, prospective mothers-in-law, negotiate a betrothal between Elsa and Gareth, son of the chief who’d killed Annerin’s husband, who’d cast them out of March, a ‘poor little backwater clinging to a legend because it had nothing else’.
Annerin tells the children the story of the sword with the black rose. Was it the lost sword of Glendorrig? No, the rose would have been red. I understood much too late that there were, in fact, three swords.
Annerin urges Fran to speak his feelings for Elsa before the betrothal is official.
Maya believes there is a dragon in the forest. Annerin encounters the beast and scares it away with the sword. Gareth is lying unconscious. Fran rescues them, but Annerin worries that no one will believe her. Gareth’s father Lukas clearly does not, and Fran raises the sword as if to defend his mother Annerin against the perceived threat. Ebba is afraid ‘blood will be spilt’.
As old grievances coincide with new, it is the innocent who pay the price, and suspense heats up as Gareth and Fran both try to sort everything out ‘once and for all’.
There is heavy backstory conflict between the families, which we are fed skilfully, bit by bit. Likewise, we learn the story of when Arete the witch came to the gate. And there’s some mystery about what’s in the ‘packet’. I love how it doesn’t tell us too much, waiting for the emotional impact to hit.
I felt the dragon was a metaphor for the unspoken hostility, the ‘unfinished business [that] stalked March’. Only little Maya tells the truth. Then, the dragon, too, becomes a character involved in the drama.
It’s well written, and once you get the hang of who belongs to which family, you get hooked into the drama.
This is the Chronicles of Eruthin Book 1, and I’d love to read the sequels.