ISBN: 1-59129-038-4
PUBLISHED BY AMERICA HOUSE BOOK PUBLISHERS
www.publishamerica.com
Witch Ember is engrossing, generally well written, and often a joy to follow, but in total it becomes a little overwhelming and by seguing into a sequel (I presume), not entirely satisfying in conclusion. Its well devised magical world is fascinating and worth reading for itself alone, but I soon avoided looking up all the foreign, made up words (and there are a lot of them) to avoid interrupting the flow of the read. Perhaps a reader would advised be to turn first to the glossary at the end (unfortunately missed by this reviewer as its location was hidden at the top of the Table of Contents) and print off a copy.
Witch Ember is a very long and convoluted tale that reminds me very much of "The Thousand and One Nights" in that it reads as a collection of episodes that, while they eventually build upon one another, seem in general to be a succession of loosely connected adventures. Each chapter seems to be structured as a story in itself complete with usually some kind of resolution, eschewing the clever trick of Sheherazade to keep the Caliph (or King Shahyar in the earliest versions of her story) hanging on each unresolved story until the next night. Clearly Mr Lawson didn't consider his reader to be as fickle as she did her listener.
Unfortunately, the pattern he chooses doesn't do the same justice to the tale as did Sheherazade's did. While I was captivated by Esmeree's story and especially by her characterisation, I found myself shutting the story down to take a breather periodically. Not quite attaining the fondest goal authors of writing a story the reader cannot put down. In its long succession of unpredicable events it becomes a feast where anyone partaking finds themselves regularly satiated. I'm not convinced that every reader will be as constant as this reviewer and pick up the threads again at the end of their rest.
The plot divides into three parts, the first of them following the perils of the child Esmeree as she grows into a fisher, a stick, and then an apprentice witch. It's during this part that the peril of becoming Esmeree's friend is established as she repeatedly fails to adequately protect them. This part is definitely a "coming of age"' story, and one might be charitable and not condemn the author for failing to set the "story goal" in the reader's mind at the start, since pure survival was her objective. I'd suggest the lack of a definitive statement of the protagonist's problem the story problem that provides the plot unity would likely have prevented an agent from offering representation.
Part two is a classic "betrayal and revenge" story, even if it overlaps into part three to complete the revenge. In part three our aimless waif gradually claims an aim in "overcoming high odds." During these two parts Esmeree slowly gains understanding and strength. It is in these sections that some idea of an objective appears dimly through the mists of the plot, but this reader did not find his assumptions satisfied at the end. The defeated enemies were only minions, but perhaps the evil antagonists are confronted and destroyed in the sequel.
I'd suggest the author pay closer attention to some modern techniques of craft in his future writing. The POV tended to waver in places not actually hopping, but drifting away into characters other than the focus of the story. Periodically the use of a superfluous speech tag irritated, and my severe draft readers would definitely red line every use of a beat masqueraiding as a speech tag. One example will do "Of course," bows Guirom้lans. The tag is not descriptive of the speech since the words are not emitted by the bow. Personally, I don't find the practice offensive in fact I'd probably use it myself if I dared but the gods of writing craft would be mortally offended. While the invented linguistics are a masterpiece in themselves (I think I detected modified words from several sources) I'd suggest they be soft pedaled. While I began to learn several words in Brackish and even EroBernac, I began to skim over most of the others and hope I could grasp the sense of the passages by their context and the miserly token of English sometimes provided.
I don't want to end on a sour note because Witch Ember is a worthy opus and would repay anyone's attentive reading. Esmeree is a fine heroine who develops convincingly into a worthy protagonist if prone to emotional outbursts or losses of confidence at infuriatingly inopportune times. The riddles of the Court of Love and the rules of the chess-like board game (can't find its name) were well used as prompts for Esmeree and clues for the reader. The supporting characters were interesting and except for Hiisi were not usually completely rounded, but were fine companions as long as they lasted. The antagonists tended to be following scripts that said "enemy," again with one exception in Guiromelans, and I found the references to a "super-antagonist"' off stage who never appeared in open opposition to the protagonist a disappointment. The magical scenario generally followed a story logic and if the author slipped a quick bend of the rules past the reader it was magically done. A good read, worth three roses.
Chris Hoare
The Wildcat's Victory
© All Materials Copyright John Lawson 2006