Charlotte Kersten

So What’s It About?

Earth * Air * Water * Fire

These elements have sustained the peaceful people of Shaftal for generations, with their subtle powers of healing, truth, joy, and intuition.

But now, Shaftal is dying.

The earth witch who ruled Shaftal is dead, leaving no heir. Shaftal’s ruling house has been scattered by the invading Sainnites. The Shaftali have mobilized a guerrilla army against these marauders, but every year the cost of resistance grows, leaving Shaftal’s fate in the hands of three people: Emil, scholar and reluctant warrior; Zanja, the sole survivor of a slaughtered tribe; and Karis the metalsmith, a half-blood giant whose earth powers can heal, but only when she can muster the strength to hold off her addiction to a deadly drug.

Separately, all they can do is watch as Shaftal falls from prosperity into lawlessness and famine. But if they can find a way to work together, they just may change the course of history.

What I Thought

This was one of the books I enjoyed the least for my r/fantasy bingo challenge for 2023. I think someone who is better at analyzing writing structure and prose might be able to make a stronger case for why this is than me, but one of my biggest challenges with the book was how strange the writing felt to me. It’s not that the prose is terrible or that there are grammatical errors, but there is just something about the flow word-to-word/sentence-to-sentence and the nature of the details included that makes each scene feel somehow unfocused, stilted, and vague.

This also applies on a chapter-to-chapter basis, where transitions often feel odd and abrupt. There is a fair amount of perspective-jumping, and one notorious (to me!) chapter opens with a paragraph from Emil, another from “the farmers,” a third from an unnamed character we haven’t been introduced to yet, and a final paragraph from Norina, a side character. There are also some very jarring time jumps. After the coup in the beginning of the book, we skip ahead to 8 years later then to 15 years later. We also miss a chunk of time after Zanja’s escape from prison to her joining Emil’s company of soldiers.

There are also some odd decisions about what pieces of world-building are and are not emphasized. We know what fire logic is, for example, but we get only a minute amount of information about the other elemental powers and what they do. Mabin, the leader of the Shaftal Rebellion, is introduced at the start of the book and then isn’t mentioned a single time until she reappears halfway through the book, at which point she becomes a major antagonist.

Another problem for me is that the characters do not feel like well-developed individuals with interiority because of the amount of narrative distance from them, the disjointed, awkward way dialogue is written and the lack of any clear development or introspection. They have universally been through horrific life experiences, but the effects remain somewhat vague, and while some characters like Zanja end the book in a much better place, the process by which that happens remains almost entirely unexplored and unstated by the book.

There are two romantic relationships between major characters by the end of the book, and both of these occur very spontaneously with little development. A found family also emerges by the end of the book, which is mostly shown through a lot of mildly unfunny banter, but this feels pretty unearned and even somewhat bizarre when Norina’s recent attempt to kill Zanja is brushed off, more or less, and characters such as Annis and Karis’s beloved raven get murdered and are then never mentioned again for the rest of the book.

I personally don’t enjoy stories that rely on convenience to progress, and that is very much the case here. Characters nearly always make decisions based on their “fire logic” intuition, the mystical connections between them, glyph cards (like tarot cards), prophetic foresight, or Karis’s talking prescient raven. There is also a lot of repetition in the plot where people get horribly wounded, magically healed, captured, and rescued multiple times.

The result of all this is that SO much feels like it is being left unspoken/unexplored, but not in a deliberately subtle or skilled way that lets the reader effectively read between the lines. It all just ends up feeling wooden and disjointed in a manner that I’ve never quite encountered before.
Overall, this was a frustrating reading experience with very little that worked for me.