Frequent readers of this blog probably know that I am a fantasy nerd from way back. Beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, continuing through Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, The Elfstones of Shannara, The Thomas Covenant series, and Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders series, I have spent a good part of my life escaping into fantastical worlds where magic is real and heroes save the world from evil monsters.

The Final Empire, the first book of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn series, is epic high fantasy at its finest. The world Sanderson creates is one of order and stability. But that order and stability comes at a great price-most of the world's population, called skaa, is used as forced labor on large plantations, under the absolute and absolutely cruel power of a noble class. The Lord Ruler controls the Final Empire. He is treated like a god, revered and hated, seemingly immortal. His dictates are enforced by a brutal group of priests called Obligators, all of whom are allomancers-people who have the power to use ingested metals for magical purposes. He also controls the dreaded Steel Ministry, creatures with spikes for eyes that can command the power of allomancy in ways more powerful than any regular human.

One man has vowed revenge against the Lord Ruler for his many atrocities. Born a skaa, Kelsier is a skilled Mistborn-an allomancer who can use all of the metals, rather than just one as most allomancers can. He develops a plan for overthrowing the Lord Ruler, and thinks he has discovered a way to kill him, using a previously unknown 11th metal. While planning this rebellion, he discovers Vin, a full Mistborn girl who was raised in the streets as part of a thieving crew. Vin is timid and suspicious of everyone, a result of years of abuse by her brother and various crew leaders. Kelsier undertakes to train her, and brings her into his own crew. Kelsier's plan seems insane-to create a skaa army and take over the capital city of Luthadel. But just maybe his plan is crazy enough to work.

The plot is well-crafted, intricate even, and despite the many characters and the almost constant machinations that are happening throughout the story, the whole things holds together beautifully. While Kelsier is the main actor, Vin is the heart of the story. Waifish, paranoid, and skittish, she survived the streets through her own wit and inner strength, calling on allomancy even before she knew what it was. Her transformation from distrusting, angry girl to full, beloved member of Kelsier's crew gives the story an emotional impact it would otherwise have lacked. The action is well-paced, with detailed descriptions of fight scenes that really give the reader a sense of what allomancy would be capable of.

The world-building is exceptionally well-done as well. Despite being what I would consider high fantasy, there are none of the standard high fantasy characters here-no wizards or trolls or elves. Instead, Sanderson created a world unlike any I've read before, with allomancy as the main driver. It includes magical creatures such as the kandra, as well as a race called terrismen, allow Sanderson to write in twists and turns that would be impossible, or at least unlikely, with only human characters.

I'm on to book two, which is so far just as good as the first. I look forward to seeing where the story goes.

My Favorite New Fantasy Series

I am a big fan of high fantasy. I got my first taste from the Narnia books, and was gifted the Shannara series as a middle schooler. Give me a series with elves and dwarves and trolls and chances are pretty good I will love it.

Not so sure I would have said the same about a fantasy series that revolves around necromancy, but that was before I discovered Sabriel, the first book in the Abhorsen series by Garth Nix. There are no elves or dwarves to be found, but there is a strong, female main character. Sabriel is the daughter of the Abhorsen, the good necromancer whose job it is to send the dead back into death, thereby undoing the work of the bad necromancers, who bring the dead back into life. When her father disappears, Sabriel is forced to leave the relative safety of her boarding school and venture into the Old Kingdom, where magic rules and technology is useless. She begins a quest to free her father and defeat an evil greater than she imagined.

One of the things I've loved about this series so far is the strong female leads. Sabriel portrays the titular young woman as someone who loves firecely, who thinks on her feet, who is more than willing to venture into the land of the dead to save people she loves. The setting is interesting-the Old Kingdom is full of magic, but it is bordered by a world that has what seemed to be mid-20th century-type technology. It gives the whole thing a bit of a steampunk vibe. I'm about a third of the way through the second book, and the strong female thing continues through that book as well. The mythology that underlies the action is different than other series I have read, which makes the story feel fresh. An added benefit is that I've been listening to it on audiobook, and Tim Robbins is the narrator. I discovered this series on a list of young adult books, but I really think that adult readers of fantasy novels will also enjoy it.

Boy's Life, by Richard R. McCammon

I suppose it is human nature to idealize our own past.  As we age, we recall the good ol' days when things were simpler.  Nothing beats the nostalgia of our remembered childhood.  A certain toy or a snippet of a

song can transport us back to an earlier time, when the biggest thing most of us had to worry about was our little league team's record, or when the next installment of our favorite comic was coming out.

Ok, I know that the past was not nearly as idyllic as "Leave it to Beaver" or "The Brady Bunch" would have us believe.  There was ugliness-child abuse and alcoholism and racism and poverty are not exactly new phenomenon in human history.  But if you were lucky, and you grew up in the 60s and 70s in America, your dad had a decent job in a mill or a factory, mom was home to greet you after school with a snack, and your summer was full of bike-riding and swimming and catching fire-flies.  It is that America that exists in Richard McCammon's Zephyr, Alabama, the setting of his novel Boy's Life.  The main character, Cory, is a 12 year old boy, in that awkward phase we now call the 'tweens.  His dad was a milkman, his mom a stay at home mother, and he and his four best friends loved comics and baseball and looking for arrowheads.  But, just as we know that the good ol' days weren't always that good, Zephyr has its secret horrors hiding below the surface.  One morning, on the way to school, Cory and his father see a car go over the guardrail and into the lake.  Cory's dad jumps in to save the driver, only to find that he is already dead-his face unrecognizable, a piano wire wrapped around his throat, handcuffed to the steering wheel.  This incident haunts Cory's father, and throughout the course of the novel we find out what happened to the man in the car.  The novel takes place over the course of a year, and is chock-full of magical happenings, culminating in the resolution of the original mystery.

The novel is written very much in the style of "Stand By Me" by Stephen King, and there appeared to be a few send-ups to the great man himself-a pet that comes back from the dead, a ghost car that prowls the roads.  McCammon sets a scene about as well as King does, with evocative descriptions and creative turns-of-phrase.  Perhaps it was my own summers spent in rural southern Alabama as a kid, but the characters and story felt very authentic to me, even as the magic strains belief.  While reading the novel, one can take the story literally as a supernatural mystery, or one can see the magic as a metaphor for the magical thinking we all have in childhood, when monsters under the bed are real, and riding our bikes really does make us feel like we've sprouted wings to fly.  It is also very much the story of one boy going from child to not-quite-a-man, and realizing that the adults in his life are not entirely what he thought them to be.  Cory learns some hard lessons the year he was 12, but they are lessons that all of us learn at one point or another.  Most of McCammon's other novels sound very much like lurid monster fiction, but they are on my to-read list anyway, because I have to believe that the man that wrote this thoughtful, nostalgic book handled those stories with the same finesse he used writing Boy's Life.

Under the Heading of Places I Wish Were Real

Sometimes I read a book that has such a strong sense of place that I feel literally transported there.  Sometimes this is a bad thing, like in Elie Weisel's Night Or A Thousand Splendid Sun's Afghanistan.  But sometimes it is a wondrous feeling, especially when the place in question is full of magic.  This is how I felt when I read the Narnia books for the first time, and frankly I'd still like to visit Caer Paravel and hang out with Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy.  Erin Morgenstern, in her debut novel The Night Circus, creates just such a magical place in Le Cirque du Reves, the setting for her imaginary game of one-upsmanship between two talented illusionists.

Celia and Marco are just children when their training begins.  Their teachers, Celia's father Prospero and Marco's guardian Alexander, are old rivals who have, over the years, challenged each other to a game.  The "game" involved pitting their pupils against each other in a challenge like no other.  Their task is to manipulate the physical world as a test of their skills, and their playing field is a circus-a magical circus that is only open at night. But things do not go as the old masters planned when Celia and Marcos stop seeing each other as adversaries and start seeing each other as something else entirely.

Le Cirque du Reves as imagined by Morganstern is a place full of amazing people doing amazing things.  There are the usual acts of contortionist and fortune teller, but there are also tents full of things that defy reality-a garden made exquisitely out of ice, a cloud maze that allows you to literally climb into the heavens, a wishing tree where wishes really come true.  Even if the book was nothing but a long description of the marvelous things at the circus I would have read it and been happy.  But there was also this really intriguing, mysterious story going on that had my interest piqued.  While I did not get all of the answers that I was hoping for about exactly what was going on, the fact that I am still thinking about the story and what it might have meant shows what an affect it had on my imagination.

I don't usually read other reviews of a book before I write my own, but I was curious about how other people were affected by the story.  I was not surprised to find that the New York Review of Books was not exactly over the moon about this book-I imagine if does not meet their rather high-falutin' definition of literary.  But the other reviewers I read all felt similarly to me.  For a first novel, this book does a pretty good job with evoking mood and setting up a solid plot structure.  Character development is oddly lacking, given the rich possibilities for the creation of a mythology to explain the enchanters and their pupils.  But unlike some of the other reviewers, I actually saw the circus itself as a character, or at least an extension of Marco and Celia.  I felt like a learned a lot about them through the kinds of creations they made for their customers.  I know that some readers may be put off by the non-linear narrative, but I didn't find it distracting at all, since each section is clearly marked, and there is no real jumping back and forth within sections, only between them.  One reviewer I read felt that the ending set up a sequel, but I'm not sure about that.  While the fate of the circus seemed rather open-ended, I was OK with it.  I like imagining the circus, traveling the world, appearing and disappearing like magic, delighting everyone who is lucky enough to discover it.

Queen of Sorcery, David Eddings

So a couple of weeks ago I posted a review of Pawn of Prophecy, the first book in David Edding's Belgariad series.  I talked about how it was a well-written fantasy series, with well-developed characters and well-paced action.  All the typical archetypes are there-the sorcerer, the witch, the warriors, the rogue.  It is an enjoyable journey in a sometimes dark fantastical world.

I just finished the second book in the series, that chronicles the further travels of Belgarath, Polgara, and Garion and their allies on their search for the orb.  As for my review of said book-I can only say...

ditto.

Who Were the Witches?

For someone as avowed in my atheism as I am, I have a hard-to-explain attraction to all things magic.  Perhaps it is something left over from my childhood, when Madeleine L'Engel and Terry Brooks were two of my favorite authors.  I've spent many hours immersed in the fantastical worlds of Tolkien and Donaldson and Gaiman-I love to get swept up in a world where the normal rules don't apply and a whole new mythology determines the actions of magical creatures.  Call it my inner geek-and I love her to the point of spending days playing RPGs like Final Fantasy.

It is a rare author that can combine the elements of the fantastic that I love with the "real world".  Michael Crichton did it in Timeline, and Neil Gaiman does it frequently in novels like Neverwhere and American Gods.  We can now add Katherine Howe to the list in her novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane.  The book centers around  Connie Goodwin, a Phd. candidate at Harvard in American Colonial history.  Her mother, Grace, a New Age aura reader living in Arizona, asks Connie to clean out her grandmother's house and prepare it for sale.  Connie, who never even knew that the house existed, travels the 60 miles or so to Marblehead, Massachusetts and begins the arduous process of clearing out decades of dirt and detritus.  She arrives to find a small house, hidden away behind a tangle of vines and an overgrown garden.  She discovers, hidden in a family bible, a key with the name Deliverance Dane rolled up in the shaft.  So begins her journey into the history of her family, and into a world where witches and vernacular magic really exist.

The story is framed in the history of the Salem witch trials, a shameful period in early American History if ever there was one.  The author, through Connie, explains the various theories people have about the whys and wherefores of the panic, long seen to be the product of perceived threats by women in the community against the strict Puritan teachings and leadership of the time.  As Connie delves deeper into the history, and mystery, of her great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's missing book of "recipes", she discovers a new theory-what if the magic was real?

The book is well-paced, with a satisfying balance of exposition and action.  The descriptions of New England, both the geography and the social history, are well done and evocative.  The author herself is a descendant of two of the accused women-one who survived the trials and one who did not.  As a result, she takes a pretty dim view of the tourist attraction nature of modern-day Salem.  Her disdain is initially shared by her character, but as the book progresses reason and wonder battle in Connie's mind, and one can imagine that Katherine Howe herself wishes that the magic were real.