Charlotte Kersten

Year published: 2003

Category: Epic fantasy

Representation: Agender characters

Summary: Brutal imprisonment has broken Aidan McAllister. Once the most famous musician of his generation, celebrated as a man beloved of the gods, his voice is now silent, his hands ruined, his music that offered beauty and hope to war-torn Elyria destroyed. Even the god who nurtured his talent since boyhood has abandoned him. But no one ever told him his crime. To discover the truth, he must risk his hard-bought freedom to unlock the mind of his god and the heart of his enemy.

My Thoughts: This had a few things going for it, but overall I didn’t really dig it. The protagonist, Aidan, is definitely my favorite thing about the book. He approaches his new life after imprisonment and the impairment of his hands with an attitude of kindness, determination, and humor that makes him really likable. In some ways, he reminds me of Robin Hobb’s Fitz and Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cazaril. Unfortunately, nothing else about this book compares to Hobb or Bujold’s work.

The biggest problem for me is Aidan’s love interest, Lara. She is a fairly miserable character in every sense of the word, and the way she treats Aidan is kind of disgusting. She constantly calls him a cripple and a weakling; she insults and rebuffs and bullies him and he just kind of passively takes it all throughout the book. We switch from Aidan’s perspective to her perspective in the second half of the book and see that she is full of self-loathing because of how she is a woman from a sexist culture, how she has been disfigured from a severe burn, how she is outcast from her clan and how she plays a role in Aidan’s betrayal. So she has stuff going on that explains why she is so horrible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to spend time in her head or see her end up with Aidan, especially when none of this is ever really changed or addressed meaningfully.

The actual “romantic” content is either incredibly off-putting because most of the time, Lara is psychologically tormenting Aidan or they are being forced to do cringey fake-dating scenarios that feel extremely out of place in a high fantasy novel. At one point they have to pretend to be a couple at a party and then go off to the woods to mime having sex, and I can’t remember the last time I was so embarrassed reading something.

Generally speaking, the treatment of women in the book isn’t great. Lara is the only significant female character and I’ve already shared my thoughts about her. Otherwise, there is a sex worker with a heart of gold who nurses Aidan back to health, propositions him, and talks briefly about her childhood sexual abuse before promptly being brutally murdered. At one point Lara briefly mentions that girls in her clan become “available” at age eleven and she has bad memories because of this, and then it is literally never brought up again. It all feels a bit random to me.

I am always a fan of secretly wise, gentle dragons, and I did enjoy the general plot of Aidan discovering the secret of the “gods” and working to free the dragons. The race of the Elhim (basically like genderless Hobbits) and their history with the dragons are interesting, too. Overall, though, I can definitely tell that this was Berg’s first book. The only other thing by her I’ve read is Flesh and Spirit, and that is definitely a much better book that captures some of the strengths I mentioned here without a lot of the negative aspects.