A to Z Reviews: Wheel of Dreams, by Salinda Tyson
From 1992 through 1999, Del Rey books published a series of 27 novels under the “Del Rey Discovery” imprint. These books weren’t always first novels (at least three of them were actually the second books in their respective series), but they were all novels by relatively newly published authors, ranging from Nicola Griffith, Mary Rosenbaum, and L. Warren Douglas to Michelle Shirey Crean, Don DeBrandt, and Kevin Teixera. The 24th novel published under the imprint was Salinda Tyson’s fantasy Wheel of Dreams, which appears to have been her only novel, although she began published short stories in the 2010s. Wheel of Dreams, the 40th entry in the A to Z Review series, is also the first novel I’ll be discussing.
Wheel of Dreams opens with Kiera’s father hosting several travelers on an evening that culminates in Keira being sold to one of the travelers, a soldier named Roshannon, to be his wife. This is just the first indication of the level of misogyny which plagues the world in which Keira and Roshannon live. The morning after her forced wedding, Keira flees from Roshannon before he awakes, stealing his clothes so she can travel as a man. Keira’s goal is the city of Cartheon, where her dead mother had told her about when she was growing up.