Cosmo Digital

Author: Robert Newcomb (Author's Site)
Page Count: 668 pages - softcover
Publisher: Del Rey
Publication Date: August 2002
Review originally written 7-8-2008

I initially did not want to read this book. It so happened I was at my favorite used bookstore while on vacation, and I saw a copy of another book written by Robert Newcomb, Savage Messiah. It looked interesting enough to pick up, but I soon realized that if I wanted to read and understand what was happening there, I would need to read the first trilogy he wrote, The Chronicles of Blood and Stone beginning with the book The Fifth Sorceress.

I went into this book with a fairly open mind, since I had not read anything of this author previously. It proved popular enough to warrant a second trilogy, and looked to be epic fantasy tale involving exiled princes fighting against evil magic. After reading through the first volume, however, the experience left more than a few sour tastes and makes me consider holding off on the second novel in the trilogy.

Let's begin with the map. Any good epic fantasy trilogy has a map, and this novel is no exception. The detailed map was one of the reasons I purchased the book. It has a variety of fancifully-named areas that drew my attention (such as Caves of the Paragon, The Vale of Torment, and Dark Lagoon), along with several areas labeled simply "Unknown" that piqued my curiosity. Through the course of this first novel the characters only explored a small area of the map, and I expect that in the remaining novels they will venture farther into unknown territory.

The map is not without drawbacks, however, and this is seen in the distances. Much like the Chronicles of the Necromancer series, this map does not list any scale or distances. That alone is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but here it becomes problematic for the author has a hard time remembering how far apart things on the map are. Take, for instance, the area around the city of Tammerland, where much of the action in the first two-thirds of the novel takes place. According to the map, Tammerland is an equal distance away from the Caves of the Paragon and the forest Shadowood. (See the map to the right for a better picture of this.) However, in the novel the Caves only take a couple hours to reach (characters are able to ride there and back to Tammerland in a single afternoon), while Shadowood is four or five days away. Now certainly the artistic rendition of the Caves of the Paragon on the map is not to scale, but if the Caves were placed anywhere near where they are on the map, the distances would still be off. While the map is very pretty, I would have liked something to say "not to scale" so as to not confuse literal minded readers such as myself.

A final minor gripe with the map is the lack of roads. Several major roads are encountered through the course of the novel, and I found myself flipping back to the map, only to find rivers listedinstead, which play no role at all in this novel. Some representation of roads (even something as simple as a dotted line connecting a few cities) would have been very nice to complete the map.

Reading through the novel, I encountered both minor and major issues. Among the minor is the author's main character and the amount of passive voice. I will address each of these in turn. The main character Tristain (the aformentioned exiled Prince) is a fairly generic brooding-yet-naive Prince character followed around by his fairly generic aged sorcerer friend Wigg. Part of me really hates Tristan, and this is due primarily to his age. Through most of the novel Tristan acts like he is about seventeen. This would be fine if he actually was seventeen, but early in the novel Tristan celebrates his thirtieth birthday. I am certain some of this was intentional to show the reader that Tristan begins to accept more responsibility as he "grows up" through the course of teh book, but I continually found the age of thirty hard to buy. Tristans characterization would have worked much better had the author rolled his age back ten years and made him twenty instead.

Beyond my issues with the main character, I was astounded by the sheer amount of passive voice present in the novel. Now I am willing to forgive large amounts of passive voice in written works, but in some early chapters it was so overwhelming I literally could no longer pay attention to the actual plotline and instead counted how many times the author descended into passive phrases. The real shame is that the vast majority of these constructions were easily correctable into active voice. Reading along I found myself silently correcting the author, changing his passive voice into active voice. When I do that I feel I am rehearsing for a linguistics class, not reading a fantasy novel. The amount of passive voice did improve in later sections of the novel, but still needed considerable work. Clearly the copyeditor did not do their job on this book.

Regardless of my feelings about Tristan and passive voice, those issues were relatively minor. I was far more concerned about the demeaning portrayals of women in this novel. Every single female character in this book is either a crazy whore, becomes a crazy whore, or is raped and killed off. Every single female, with only one exception of a baby girl born at the end, and even she was nearly murdered and may still become a crazy whore in future novels. I do not know if this raging mysogyny was intentional, or just the product of bad writing. Either way it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I am tempted to read the next novel The Gates of Dawn solely to see if these characterizations improve at all. Ironically, the novel is dedicated to the author's wife, Joyce.

My other major issue with this novel, perhaps even more so than the demeaning portrayals of women, are the outright errors present in the text. This is more a copyediting issue than a storyline issue, but several times I encountered errors so blatant I had to reread paragraphs to make sure I read them correctly. These are not simple typos; these are interactions where characters will contradict themselves or be talking to the wrong person entirely. For example, early on in the novel is a scene where Tristan and Wigg discuss sorcerers and Death Enchantments. (page 75 in the paperback version) As they are talking, Tristan mentions that he feels women could be trained as sorcerers, but only if they agreed to the Death Enchanments. However, on the very next page Wigg mentions Death Enchantments again and Tristan reacts as if he had never heard of them at all! I do not know if this dialogue got mixed up when the author was editing the scene or if it was a problem of the editor, but either way it should have been noticed and changed before the book was printed. Hopefully the subsequent novels in this trilogy will have a better editor assigned to them.

Because of the long list of reasons I have outlined above, I can not really recommend this novel. I will attempt to read the second novel, and perhaps it will the greatest thing I have ever read. Based on this first attempt by Robert Newcomb, however, I sincerely doubt it.

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