Elitist Book Reviews

I think I've mentioned before how I like to see authorial “progress” from one book to the next. Seeing them get better in at least one aspect of their craft with each progressive offering to the reading masses gives me hope that there will, someday, be more authors that I love to read. In general, I think that most authors fall into this category. It's hardly ever that I find one that seems to have regressed further from the goal that I think each of them should strive for: greatness in storytelling. As I'm sure you can guess by now, this book is one of those.

LANCE OF EARTH AND SKY is the second in the planned Chaos Knight trilogy and continues the story of Vidarian Rulorat and the empire of Alorea. Mostly, however, this is a story about the empire, as Vidarian factors so little in what actually happens.

After the end of SWORD OF FIRE AND SEA (spoiler for the first book!), a dimensional portal of sorts has been opened and all sorts of chaos has been spread across the land. The natural magic present in the world has quickly faded away and been replaced by an elementally-based magic system that feels very much like Wheel of Time run through the rule-based powers of Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson) from the Incredibles. Use the element—water, air, fire, earth—that is available and channel it into streams that you can ultimately weave together and blast people with.

The replacement of this magic has upended the entire world, killing off a large number of leaders that have been magically lengthening their lives. In the wake of this chaos, the trading company that has been dictating what the government of Alorea was doing, begins to take a decidedly more direct route to governing. Additionally, the opening of the gate has brought in magical items and constructs that have been absent for centuries. The changes that have come in the wake of the open portal are constantly reiterated throughout the book. Almost like a mantra.

Ohmmmm...

Sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. Regression.

The crux of the problem with the book was that where SWORD was very linear but adventurous, LANCE is very linear and pointless. The main character, instead of doing anything of import, spends nearly every waking moment meeting someone new, introducing himself to them, drinking another cup of kava, or listening to other people talk. It was uber-frustrating. When he finally does do something vaguely interesting, the outcome feels more like he did it so that the author could showcase another part of the world-building.

If anything, further world-building seemed to be at the heart of the book, and yet none of it really did anything to develop the world. Thus, instead of the presentation of the world feeling like an oil slick riding across the surface of an abyss-deep ocean (good), it comes across more like a puddle of water spread across the concrete (severely lacking).

There were a couple aspects of the story that stayed consistent between the two books: there are still a ton of characters surrounding Vidarian, nearly every one of them able to communicate telepathically. About half of them this time can shape-change as well though. The ending was also incredibly lacking in impact again. Incredibly, the largest-seeming event in the entire book is given away on the back cover. There was very little in the book that held what I like to see, and that's a solid reason in my mind to stay away from the rest of this series.

On the up-tick, if you're looking for a book to just stroll through, with no real thinking necessary, and give you a great way to suck up a few hours, grab this one. It'll definitely be good for that.

Recommended Age: 15+
Sex: None
Violence: Very low key, no gore
Profanity: Very mild and infrequent

Want it? Get it here.

I, like any decent purveyor of story critiques, am an author-hopeful. Once, about ten years ago and near the beginning of my writing “career”, I came up with the idea of evil monsters that could travel through shadows to get where they wanted. I thought at the time how creepy and cool something like that could be, and that I might actually use these shadow beasts in a story someday. That is, until a good friend of mine suggested that doing so might not be such a great idea because the bad guys could just wait until night time (or ANY time/place that it got dark) pop in on our heroes, slaughter the lot of them, and then take over the world. End of story. I’ve moved on since then. This novel felt like it hadn’t.

SWORD OF FIRE AND SEA is the first book in a trilogy named The Chaos Knight and is Erin Hoffman's debut novel. It is a story told from the perspective of a ship’s captain, Vidarian Rulorat, who has been called upon to fulfill a generations-old family promise to the fire priestesses of Kara’Zul. His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to accompany Ariadel, a special fire priestess, from the temple of the fire priestesses in the north to a friendly temple of water priestesses in the far south. Along the way, he encounters rogue telepaths called the Vkortha, mighty gryphons, love, betrayal, and a prophecy or two, as well.

This one fell within my 10% rule pretty quickly, and if I hadn’t been asked to review it, I would have bailed really early. It wasn’t that it was particularly bad, there just wasn’t anything that really grabbed me. The prose is decent, though quite explanatory, and stays pretty high-level. Characterization, unfortunately, sums to essentially null. As the story progresses, and the main party amasses more people and more sentient gryphons, the names and references all got jumbled and difficult to tell from one page to the next who we were talking about now or really what was going on at all.

At times the story tried to get bigger, bringing in a trading company that dictates what the central government does. Then we're introduced to the prophecy of the one that is supposed to come and seal away the chaos magic forever behind an already closed gate. These scenes though were counter-balanced by others that just cripple the story—-the most memorable being the entire chapter devoted to the massage house, with its masseuses and their lotion. And there was a cat. I’m sorry, but I just hate finding cats in fantasy novels. I should probably write a fantasy story about a cat sometime so that I’ll hate them less.

On second thought, no, I shouldn’t.

The plot of SWORD is very linear and progressional, with one event/task leading the main party of characters to the next. In so doing, they travel quite extensively and visit many places that are quite difficult to discern from one another. Each trip is completed by gryphon, and so these legs of the journey happen on a very short time scale. This leads to a really vague sense of just how big the imagined world of the story is and how each of the individual pieces of the world-building fit together. I’ve heard complaints before about the horse being the “fantasy equivalent of a motorcycle”, and in this one the gryphons act as almost a perfect substitute for the "fantasy helicopter". They move the characters from one location to the next, flying through the air at fast speeds, and never seem to get any attention. At times they impart information. In others, they fight a bit, though those scenes are few and far between.

The two largest difficulties I had were the nebulous magic system and the lack of an impactful ending. The main character acquires the ability from a goddess to access the magical power of the world, and then starts using it with little to no training or effort as if he were a prodigy. At each of these times, he uses the magic "without thinking" or he just knows how to do what he wants, as the power is somehow tied to his will. At one point, the Vkortha use a wind-storm to swoop down on the main characters, steal Ariadel—the special fire priestess, in case you’ve forgotten—and then disappear. (Shadow monsters, anyone?) Later, the main character is given a magical power equivalent to that needed to move planets within the universe. (Sunshine…heroes maybe?) Every time the magical ability came up, the results seemed to get more and more preposterous. And then the big bang ending, which kept getting referred to throughout the book, passed like a puff of air and seemed to be forgotten entirely. At first, I totally thought that I had missed it, but no. The impact just wasn't there.

Looking back at this review, I’m seeing a whole lot of complaint and I apologize for that. Really, there’s nothing that was absolutely unforgivable about this story, it’s just that there was a whole lot of mediocrity and it was handled in a fairly poor way. If I could take back the time I spent on this one, I definitely would. And if you get the chance to read this one, and you think anywhere near like we do here at EBR, then I’d probably suggest that you pass on it as well.

Recommended age: 14 plus
Language: One reference to a swear word as being a "bedroom" word
Violence: Some fighting, but not really
Sex: A single reference to someone being naked