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Title: Erekos
Author: A. M. Tuomala
Genre: High fantasy
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A scholar who has fallen in love with the people he was sent to spy on and a witch who has foolishly raised her sister from the dead must find a way to end a never-ending war in a land where gods walk the earth.
Thoughts: Tuomala has some of the most lush, evocative prose I've had the pleasure to read in awhile. It's a little strangely formal in some places, but the story moves with a dreamlike rhythm through a densely imagined world. Most of the characters manage to sidestep many of the tired tropes that plague high fantasy, somehow feeling like archetypes without being stereotypes.
There are some places where the baroque language verges on twee, such as the quarter chapter from the perspective of a snake. I think the author stays on the safe side, and rather liked the contrasts in viewpoints, but some may find it mildly irritating.
I very much appreciated the fact that all the characters are drawn in gray instead of black and white--the witch who is too lovingly stubborn to realize the sin she has committed, the scholar who knows full well that his painstaking research would be used against the people he is studying, the king who does not enjoy war but cannot see a way around it and would consider atrocities if it would only save his people, the queen who never wished to be married at all, the royal brother whose dissolution may be his only defense against a duty he cannot agree with. I also quite liked the gods, who are well away from our hackneyed visions of recycled Greek and Roman myths (but may be closer to the original myths' intent).
I do have a couple problems. That gorgeous, flowing language is occasionally rather hard to follow. I found the map at the beginning to be more confusing than helpful, and then took far too long to manage to grasp the geography and politics of the warring countries. For too long, I couldn't figure out what ethnicity Achane the witch belonged to, or where physically Erlen the scholar was living.
Also, given that this story begins from Achane's viewpoint and is heavily biased towards her and her sister's plights for the first half, I really thought that she was the protagonist. She's not. Erlen is. Erlen's actions resolve the plot, while Achane's plotline turns out to be rather incidental. If she had not been there...the overall plot would have been exactly the same. Her quest is far more compelling, but ultimately not central to the book as a whole, and so I found the resolution to be less satisfying than I might have wished.
Even so, I very much enjoyed the act of reading this book. And once I'd reoriented to focus on Erlen, I thought the resolution was quite interesting and not at all what I'd expected, in a good way. But it's not the plot you're reading for, really--it's the jungle-lush, wandering sentances that gradually reveal a gorgeous world.
Author: A. M. Tuomala
Genre: High fantasy
Thingummies: 4
Synopsis: A scholar who has fallen in love with the people he was sent to spy on and a witch who has foolishly raised her sister from the dead must find a way to end a never-ending war in a land where gods walk the earth.
Thoughts: Tuomala has some of the most lush, evocative prose I've had the pleasure to read in awhile. It's a little strangely formal in some places, but the story moves with a dreamlike rhythm through a densely imagined world. Most of the characters manage to sidestep many of the tired tropes that plague high fantasy, somehow feeling like archetypes without being stereotypes.
There are some places where the baroque language verges on twee, such as the quarter chapter from the perspective of a snake. I think the author stays on the safe side, and rather liked the contrasts in viewpoints, but some may find it mildly irritating.
I very much appreciated the fact that all the characters are drawn in gray instead of black and white--the witch who is too lovingly stubborn to realize the sin she has committed, the scholar who knows full well that his painstaking research would be used against the people he is studying, the king who does not enjoy war but cannot see a way around it and would consider atrocities if it would only save his people, the queen who never wished to be married at all, the royal brother whose dissolution may be his only defense against a duty he cannot agree with. I also quite liked the gods, who are well away from our hackneyed visions of recycled Greek and Roman myths (but may be closer to the original myths' intent).
I do have a couple problems. That gorgeous, flowing language is occasionally rather hard to follow. I found the map at the beginning to be more confusing than helpful, and then took far too long to manage to grasp the geography and politics of the warring countries. For too long, I couldn't figure out what ethnicity Achane the witch belonged to, or where physically Erlen the scholar was living.
Also, given that this story begins from Achane's viewpoint and is heavily biased towards her and her sister's plights for the first half, I really thought that she was the protagonist. She's not. Erlen is. Erlen's actions resolve the plot, while Achane's plotline turns out to be rather incidental. If she had not been there...the overall plot would have been exactly the same. Her quest is far more compelling, but ultimately not central to the book as a whole, and so I found the resolution to be less satisfying than I might have wished.
Even so, I very much enjoyed the act of reading this book. And once I'd reoriented to focus on Erlen, I thought the resolution was quite interesting and not at all what I'd expected, in a good way. But it's not the plot you're reading for, really--it's the jungle-lush, wandering sentances that gradually reveal a gorgeous world.
