Instead, he, like Jes, is determined make a name for himself by running the Fives, becoming his own man, charting his own course.

He has no desire to become a soldier, as his uncle wishes he knows he'll really be just a pawn, a figurehead, the person to be trotted out to appease the masses but with no say in how they are treated. He may be willing (with a little prodding) to help Jes rescue her mother and sisters, but he wants no part in the court intrigues that animate his Uncle Gargaron and his grandmother. Kalliarkos, in contrast, knows far more about the corruption and cruelty of the ruling class than Jes does, and he finds it sickening. Though Jes understood this as far as it related to her own personal situation, she'd never before had the sickening realities of the lives of the less privileged forced in her face-until her family is torn apart. Think a giant obstacle course, but with five separate sections, each with mythological resonance.Įfea's colonial society is a fiercely patriarchal one, as well as a racist and classist one.

But since their strict father is a military officer, he's often away from home, and Jes has taken advantage of his absence to sneak out to train for the Fives, 'an intricate, multilevel athletic competition that offers a chance for glory to the kingdom's best contenders' (flap copy). Though they are biracial, Jes and her sisters have been raised following Saroese customs, and are allowed little freedom of thought or of movement through the royal city where they live. Our first-person protagonist, Jessamy, and her three sisters are oddities in the society of Efea: though their lighter-skinned father, Captain Esladas, emigrated north from Saro, and is thus a member of the Patron, or ruling class that conquered Efea 100 years earlier, their darker-skinned mother, Kiya, is a 'Commoner,' or native Efean. It's first book, Court of Fives, is set not in a feudal society, but in a colonized one.

Though her past books were written for adults, her new Court of Fives series is for the YA market.

Court of Fives by Kate Elliott