Allen & Unwin (Arena) January 2009: ISBN 9781741756166

Debutante Deborah Kalin, a Clarion South graduate, has hit the ground running with this superb fantasy, hand-picked by Louise Thurtell, co-publisher of A&U's new Arena imprint from her Friday Pitch slushpile.

Told in the first person by Matilde, who but for her grandmother's tenacity would, by the time the book starts, already be Duenin of the landlocked country of Sueben, Shadow Queen is a fantasy that keeps the reader on edge and looking over one shoulder for an attack or a betrayal. It's that kind of book.

Matilde constantly has to make fine adjustments to her world view in order to stay alive. The victories she gains tend to be Pyrrhic at best and compromising of her integrity at worst, but she lives to fight another day, no matter what the cost. Right from the outset we can see that Matilde is going to be up against a great deal of strife with pretty poor odds on her side. We watch her dig herself out of hole after hole, only to have to step into such a deep one at the end of the book in order to hang onto the gains she's made that we wonder if she will ever be able to make her way out.

Her bloodline, or so say her enemies, is weak and unfit to rule, and indeed we might sometimes think they are right, but we gradually realise that Matilde is not without resources. She has magical skill and a gift for languages, and she has friends, even if they don't always seem to treat her kindly. By the end of the book we see that she is not weak or incompetent, and that, dire as her situation may seem, she will not give up – and might even succeed in gaining her rightful place in life, given a bit of help and a lot of luck.

While not an especially Fat Fantasy – in fact, at 302pp of a trade paperback, it's positively skinny – Shadow Queen is the only the start of Matilde's story. There are two more books to come, and the trilogy is collectively called The Binding. Mathilde is indeed bound, first by spellcraft and later by a vow made under duress. I suspect it will take her all of books two and three to get herself fully unbound, if she manages it at all.

Kalin writes well. Her prose is flowing and deceptively easy to read, appearing artless even in passages that can, on closer investigation, be seen to be thoughtfully and cleverly constructed. Her descriptions are delicious, and she managed to make me care about Matilde. There were times when I wanted to grab our heroine by the shoulder and shout "look out" into her ear as I rode with her on the steep and rocky path Kalin created for us, breathing a sigh of relief each time Matilde managed to survive still another bout of danger. I was sorry when the book ended, and am waiting impatiently for its successor.

You can follow Deborah Kalin's journey through the trilogy at http://deborahkalin.com , where she posts news and runs a blog.