Daniells, Rowena Cory: The King's Bastard
The King's Bastard (2010)
Written by: Rowena Cory Daniells
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Pages: 640 (Mass Market Paperback)
Series: Book One of Three
Disclaimer: free from author
This is one of those rare cases where an author approached me about reviewing their book. I say rare, because honestly, it doesn't happen much, and when it does, I usually say no. But I looked at the author's website, and checked out the publisher/cover (yes, I'm biased: I want a pretty cover by a publisher that isn't obscure) and decided that since I was making an effort to read more epic fantasy, I'd give this a shot. Imagine my shock when the book arrived and the return address was from AUSTRALIA! Talk about pressure! But the author was kind enough to provide a nifty bookmark that advertises the whole trilogy, a signed copy, and a nifty little sticker that adds some color to my inner copy. :) Anyway, be that it was FREE and I agreed to review it, Daniells book moved to the top of the TBR.
The premise: ganked from the author's website: Cloaked in silent winter snow the Kingdom of Rolencia sleeps as rumours spread of new Affinity Seeps, places where untamed power wells up. Meanwhile, King Rolen plans his jubilee unaware of the growing threat to those he loves.
By royal decree, all those afflicted with Affinity must serve the Abbey or face death. Sent to the Abbey because of his innate Affinity, the King’s youngest son, Fyn, trains to become a warrior monk. Unfortunately, he’s a gentle dreamer and the other acolytes bully him. The only way he can escape them is to serve the Abbey Mystic, but his Affinity is weak.
Fiercely loyal, thirteen year-old Piro is horrified to discover she is also cursed with unwanted Affinity. It broke their mother’s heart to send Fyn away, so she hides her affliction. But, when Fyn confesses his troubles, Piro risks exposure to help him.
Even though Byren Kingson is only seven minutes younger than his twin, Lence, who is the king's heir, Byren has never hungered for the Rolencian throne. When a Seer predicts that he will kill Lence, he laughs. But Lence Kingsheir sees Byren’s growing popularity and resents it. Enduring loyalty could be Byren’s greatest failing.
Review style: There's a lot I'd like to discuss here: the world-building and what Daniells makes of a land in the throes of winter (there's some really cool things here), the use of a gay character who--while not the hero, is pretty close to the hero--and what I think Daniells did both right and wrong in the portrayal; overall characterization and how it affected my enjoyment of the book, and then some general stylistic things that only I'd be anal enough to notice and be bothered by. I'll discuss my concern for the trilogy as a whole and whether or not I'll continue reading. Spoilers, yes, so skip to "My Rating" if said spoilers scare you. Otherwise, read onward.
I don't know if this is fair or not, but I'm going to start with the things I liked and then move down to the things I didn't care for and why. So, starting with the positives:
I really liked the world-building. Setting-wise, winter/arctic settings nab my attention easily, though I will admit to feel perplexed by the map, which shows the equator jutting right through the middle of our country, which includes a snow bridge of sorts. Okay, I love the canals, the speed-skating as a method of travel, and everything involving winter and the living in, but maybe my brain is missing some fundamental piece of info, but doesn't the equator of a planet get the most sun and therefore the most heat? The equator here is tropical jungle, ocean, or desert, and I have trouble imaging this world as an ice world, though maybe that's what I'm supposed to think. I can't remember if winter is a perpetual state of living here, but maybe it is. Cool, but I wish that map hadn't made my brain do a weird little questioning flip. :)
Also, once I understood the nature of Affinity and Affinity Beasts, I was quite engaged by them too. It took me a little while, but I liked the social order built around Affinity and lack thereof, and while I sometimes had trouble picturing Affinity beasts based on their names alone (which actually are good in terms of giving you a clue regarding appearance), I quite liked the development. I'm still a little confused about the origin of Affinity and what seeps are and what that means for the land and whatnot, but hey, I'm entertained!
Characters are interesting here, and by interesting, I mean GOOD. Our point of view characters are, for the most part, GOOD PEOPLE. So when bad things happen, you feel really bad for them. Dreadfully bad. Kicking-and-screaming-life-isn't-fair! bad.
For me, that's a problem: the bad things that happen aren't wholly of these characters' own making. Oh, they create problems, but not the kind that make me have the reaction mentioned above. They're victims of circumstance or malicious plotting, and that frustrates me. I like GOOD characters, but I also like very flawed characters, and by flawed I mean a character has the best of intentions but still accidentally kills thirty people kind of flawed. That's compelling, and that's what makes my heart weep for a character.
Here, not so much: bad thing upon bad thing happens to people, and you get the sense it's really not deserved. Byren is mistaken for a lover of men and that pretty much threatens his entire position in his family and destroys his chances with the woman he loves, Elina. And it doesn't help when you see how his behavior will add fuel to the fire (him not taking Elina when she threw herself at him, out of honor mind you, but still easily misinterpreted because he won't state his intentions; then refusing a hot barmaid because he's so in love with Elina, but the refusal is public and gives people like his brother and Cobalt, well, fuel for the rumor mill).
Fyn I liked pretty well, despite how tired I am of the whole I'm-getting-bullied-by-people-who-should-know-better-and-I-can't-turn-to-the-people-in-power-because-they-won't-believe-me/it'll-make-it worse. This hurts more than anything, because I can't stand bullying, so rather than immediately feeling sympathy for the character, I want to grab him by the collar and shake him senseless and tell him to stand up for himself or at least make enough noise so that his complaints are heeded, you know? Ugh, how frustrating. I admit I was surprised to see where Fyn's story ended in terms of all the political machinations of the monastery amounting to nothing, but I don't trust it, not by a longshot. I wonder if the monks have anything to do with the larger plot threatening Rolen's kin. That said, I liked Fyn better then Byren, as he's more sympathetic and he's a quite honorable. Not that Byren isn't, but I've got more to say about him later.
Piro grew to fascinate me as well. I like how she matured in the book and did everything she could to make things right, even if it meant screwing things up. There's not a lot I can say about her other than to admire her story arc and to appreciate the things she does to save herself and her mother and even her father for that matter, who resists her efforts. She's less of a victim of circumstance and machinations, but she's still a victim. A less frustrating one because she acts, whereas when Byren acts, you know he's just digging a deeper hole for himself.
Here's my problem with Byren. While he is honorable and he offers sensible advice and battle tactics and he loves his brother and doesn't want the kingship AT ALL, I kind of hate how stereotypically he's portrayed in response to homosexuality. No, he's not gay. His best friend Orrie is, and when Orrie--thinking he's near death--professes his love, it throws everything into a mess for Byren. You wouldn't think a verbal confession would cause a problem, but lovers of men where a symbol that's unfortunately synonymous with a group of people who tried to overthrow the King sometime ago. Byren has to hide the symbol, but it's found on him, so he covers for his best friend so Orrie doesn't get disinherited, but that backfires because Orrie owns said symbol, making people think that the only reason Byren was covering was because they were lovers. Why else would he cover for his best friend ever, right?
That's not the problem. I actually sort of like Byren's uneasy response to Orrie's confession: he accepts his friend, but he's weirded out by the feelings and worries about what the feelings will mean if they're made any more public than Orrie's family. And he's right to worry. But he's such a prick about it sometimes, and then when he meets a woman he thinks is a lover of women, HE GETS TURNED ON BY THE THOUGHT.
So. freaking. typical. Men who don't mind the homosexuality of the opposite sex because it's hot, but who are weirded out and/or adamantly against homosexuality of their own gender. Yes, it's typical and human and realistic, but I wanted Byren to be made of bigger stuff than that. Because Orrie's feelings are treated like something of an inconvenience, and while it does play a bigger role in the plot, it's frustrating because Byren doesn't deserve the consequences of the rumors, but he loses everything because of them. Personally, I would've been more engaged if Byren actually realized that maybe he DID have feelings for his best friend, so that by time the rumors were made public, there was some truth to them, and Byren's denial would be more than a statement of fact, but rather a betrayal of Orrie in some way.
I think Daniells recognized this need for a betrayal by the end, though I'm still confused by Orrie's reactions to Byren's comments. The only thing I can figure is that Orrie prizes himself higher than Lence, but feels Byren treats him lower than Lence, and that's a hard thing to swallow. I also wonder if Orrie feels as Elina mistakenly did: as second-best to the person Byren really loved.
Miscommunication and lack of it also drove me a little crazy. Piro doesn't reveal everything she's seen about Lence and Cobalt, even though she has suspicions about the latter. Revealing this may not have made a difference for Byren later, but it may have made Byren wonder, and maybe he would've recognized the trap before it was sprung. I also hated that Byren didn't simply approach Orrie straight away and reveal he heard the whole blackmail scheme. Let them work together to feed Cobalt misinformation and lead him into a trap! Sure, that came out eventually, but it was frustrating to be in Byren's head when he wondered why Orrie wouldn't come clean. I wanted them both to be honest with each other and work together, to take action even if it ended up failing. Sometimes, it took a little too long for that to happen in this book.
We also have the girl-in-the-refrigerator syndrome. I may be misnaming it, but it's essentially a character that exists only to spur her male counterparts into action. Yes, Elina, I'm talking about you. I started out liking the character for her strength, but she goes backwards from that point: being too hurt to seek out the truth from the man she supposedly loves, betraying the secret to his brother (that irked me more than anything), starting a fight with Piro and then blaming her when her actions lead to a confrontation between the Old Dove and his only remaining son. Then she has the gall to wish she and Byren had been lovers when the going gets hot and she gets in trouble? Why exactly is she the belle of the ball anyway in that all the men who aren't related to her are dying to get into her pants? I'm sorry for what happened to her in the end, but I'm glad she's gone. She was a poisonous character who was nothing more than an object. She drove a wedge between Lence and Byren (raise your hand if you think Lence is REALLY dead and if you think that what happened in the end won't somehow be used against Byren later?), and now it appears she's driving a wedge between Byren and Orrie. Oh, how wonderfully frustrating! :-/ Also, I wish it'd been Byren who had to be talked down from rescuing Elina IMMEDIATELY. He should've wanted to go after her first thing and then have others talk him down. I don't care if the reasons were sound for waiting, would you REALLY let the love of your life get screwed and/or raped just for the sake of having greater chances of taking back the castle? Maybe that's logical, but it's not very heroic or exciting. There were better ways to handle this, ways that wouldn't have taken much time and wouldn't have left me feeling a little slimy (Elina could've warned him to save himself and her people no matter what on her way out, much like she wanted the room burned at the end).
Now, for little nitpicks that only I have the gall to point out:
First page: Ah, how he loved Rolenica!
If I'd read this in the stores, I would've put the book back on the shelf. It's just so corny to my eyes/ears!
Page 86: "Arrgh!" Garzik gasped.
This is just a pet peeve. I hate the spelling of grunts and moans and screams and such. Again, it looks corny to my eyes/ears.
Page 163: Orrade stiffened imperceptibly, then turned his back on Byren.
If one stiffens imperceptibly, how does someone else perceive it?
Page 290: in an effort to prove that Orrie is, indeed, attracted to men, Cobalt gives him a full-mouthed kiss and accuses Orrie's body of betraying him. Okay, this just pisses me off: I'm a woman, but just because a member of the opposite sex kisses me doesn't mean I'm going to get sexually excited, especially if it's a forced, unwanted kiss. Forget how hot the guy is too. If I don't want it, I'm not going to be excited by such a thing. Maybe men are just different? The penis reacts to any kind of shock? I don't know, but that just annoyed the snot out of me, because it's a step away of saying that if Cobalt had taken Orrie right then and there sexually, that Orrie would've liked it. :-/
Or maybe I'm reading too much into it.
My Rating
Glad It Was Free: for a 640 page book, it's a remarkably fast read. Heroic and likable and sympathetic characters really help speed the story along, so when things go wrong or right, you really feel for them. That said, these characters are so GOOD that I really don't want to see what's in store. I kind of want to herd them into a box and say, "They all lived happily ever after!" and be done with it. No more adventures, no more torture, because frankly, I think these characters are going to go through far worse before things get better. Normally, I don't have a problem with this, but for some reason, I can't cross that sadist line with these characters. Maybe it's because they're mostly such innocent victims that I can't stomach it? Maybe. But they're heroic and worth admiring, and of the three POV characters, I think our heroine Piro was my favorite, if only because she had the most interesting story but MOSTLY because she had the most growth. I feel too that Daniells has certainly been influenced by George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, but in a good way: hey, this place is stuck (temporary or permanent, I don't know) in WINTER, and there's even a minor character named Winterfall, which makes me think of Winterfell, which basically gets Martin stuck in my brain. That aside, there's politically maneuvering (which I can't say I care for, but that's me), interesting magic, and again, really likable characters and a pace that goes by remarkably fast. What's better for you epic fantasy readers is that this trilogy is supposed to be complete by September, which means you won't be waiting years and years and years between installments. I'm not sure if I'll be continuing, because while the book is enjoyable, I'm not sure I can see these characters tortured any more. But maybe if my TBR pile every looks manageable, I could give the rest of the trilogy a shot. After all, I like most of the POV characters, the world-building is fascinating (setting and magic, yay!), and I am curious to see what comes of the strained friendship of Byren (the man who might end up king) and Orrie, the man who's in love with his best friend. While the book doesn't FOCUS on this relationship, it is something of an inciting incident, and I wonder: will Orrie become an enemy, or a lover, or will he remain a true friend to the bitter end?
It may be worth reading onward to find out. But I cringe in advance for these poor, poor characters . . . .
Thanks to the author for the free copy of the book!
Cover Commentary: Love it. The sharp contrast is striking and draws my eye to the details of the warrior in the front and the city scape in the back. This is the kind of epic fantasy cover I enjoy if it's not something abstract. It's illustrated without looking dated (not to say it may not look dated in ten years, but I hate the stuff that looks dated NOW), and it's quite eye-catching. The other covers in the trilogy look fascinating as well, especially book two.
Next up: Interfictions 2: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing edited by Christopher Barzak and Delia Sherman