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Book Reviews by Caroline Miniscule
The Chalice of Life is a fantasy quest novel with a difference - the action takes place on three different planets, worlds where both technology and magic work side by side.
The summary of the plot:
| Thalas: a world on the brink of civil war. The Carotian Union: a nascent confederation of planets at the edge of destruction. Eliander: a prince lost millennia ago to the flow of normal space-time. On a world where both magic and technology function, seven extraordinay souls set out on the Quest of the Lost Prince. Passionate mystics, honest thieves, and a silver-tongued bard with a penchant for instigating barroom brawls: what the Carotian goddess Minissa was thinking when she selected them, she alone knows. Inconceivable dangers await them around every turn on worlds they never knew existed. But such trivialities never deter a band of true heroes... |
Author Karen Anne Webb has set herself an ambitious task, and while this first novel in a proposed series has promise, it also has a few problems.
The idea of setting a fantasy novel on three different planets is an interesting one, but when the "questors" travel via Portal rather than space ship, and when swords are used instead of ray guns, one wonders why she bothered.
| Another problem, one that most quest fantasies have, is the sheer number of characters. Other books solve this by providing a List of Dramatis Personae in the front of the book, or at least in an appendix, whereis in The Chalice of Life if takes over 60 pages for all seven of the questors to be introduced and their backgrounds and histories given, before they finally arrive at the spot where they are to begin their quest. |
The seven questors
Deneth - a Thalacian bard- the sole Thalacian
Habie (Habadiah) - a Lemurian (telepathic)
Alla - an Erebian "Forest Dweller" shape-shifter
Torreb bent Eroch - a healing priest
Prince T'cru - a Tigroid
Mistra bas Carthanas of Caros - the sole Carotian
Mosaia
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Here's the first few paragraphs of the prologue:
| "“Heroes,” mused the Sage. “What’s happened to all the heroes? And where in the name of Ereb are they when you need them?” He took a long drag on his pipe, then leaned his chin on his staff and went back to staring in the fire.
Not wanting to rush him, the Chronicler waited patiently. However, as the silence dragged out the space of many heartbeats, she began to wonder if he had forgotten her. Had he wandered into that realm where dream meets memory and so become ensnared? Or had he merely fallen asleep? “That remark is not one I would ever have expected to hear escape your lips,” she prompted at last. “Master,” she added, as if the concept of master and pupil went beyond her ken.
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and here's a couple of paragraphs of the first chapter, which introduced Habie, the Lemurian thief and the first "questor" we meet.
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In a marketplace in the Carotian capital, a diminutive figure lounged against a wall. She was doing her best to blend into her surroundings and escape notice, and she was, on the whole, succeeding. Like Tuhl, she was a Lemurian. Unlike Tuhl, she had not undergone the Sleep of Transformation that set the old sage apart. In this, she was not alone. When the Lemurians had learned of Tuhl’s existence 20 years ago, the news had swept the Lemurian colony like a violent tide. A Lemurian who had undergone the Transformation and still lived? Incredible! However, even with Tuhl as a living example that the change could still take place, the Lemurians who chose that path when he came of an age to do so were rare indeed.
Her fur was tawny, touched with rose and striped with pastel green. Green feathered away as hthe striped crossed her breast and throat, her face was a sea of unbroken tan. Her eyes were htat variety of hazel whose color shifts, in her case to bright emerald when she was angry and to a brown mottled with green and gold sparks when she was truly pleased. This interplay of colors brought to her coat tand eyes the hue of dappled sunlight on a forest floor. No true child of Minissa - or any of the other deities involved with art or nature, could have looked upon that woodland palette and not had his breath stolen away.
She hated it. It was her bane, her curse, the source of her misery. Those markings the Carotians would have found so exquisite formed no distinct pattern: there were no whorls, no branching, no true shaping of light by dark. Her coat announced to any who gave her so much as a perfunctory glance that she was a foudling and that no family had every claimed her.
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These paragraphs are examples of a type of narrative that I struggle with. The omniscient narrator gets into the head of every character in every scene - all emotions revealed, all thoughts detailed, all behavior explained. In other words... too much detail!
As a fantasy, the language employed in narrative and dialog is, for the most part, typically "olde worlde" and ornate, but this reviwer found the occasional intrusions of "modern" slang and turns of phrase jarring, breaking the mood.
The plotting is tight, the world-building intriguing. If you don't mind the hard slog through the densely packed prose, you might find this book of interest.
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