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Children Of Fire (2013)

by Drew Karpyshyn(Favorite Author)

3.62 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0345542231 (ISBN13: 9780345542236)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Del Rey

series

The Chaos Born

review 1: One of the lovely things about working in a library is that when my stack of reading runs a little low, I can just walk through our New Books shelves and find something that looks interesting. That happens to be how I found Children of Fire. Being in the mood for some epic fantasy, I was pretty excited. Finding out that Karpyshyn was not a debut author made me rather hopeful that this might be a deeply engrossing read with a well built world.Children of Fire focuses on four children born of the power of Daemron the Slayer, a character who is basically the God of Chaos (I am simplifying things a bit). Keegan, Scythe, Vaaler, and Cassandra have each been created with Daemron’s magic, something that both they and those around them are unaware of. In particular, this has mad... moree Keegan and Cassandra incredibly powerful mages and Seers. The story starts with Daemron sending out his power and the resulting four births. The point of view for narration is passed between them with a few forays into the minds of secondary characters while our quartet is too young to understand what’s going on around them. The book ends once they have reached adulthood and have been able to each answer the archetypal Call to Adventure, Pass the Threshold, and through the Belly of the Whale.Oh yes, Karpyshyn is obviously playing with a lot of epic fantasy tropes. We have a drawn out Heroic Journey (book one finishes Departure, so I’ll assume we’ll have have a trilogy when all is done that will feature Initiation as book two and Return as book three), our quartet is a wizard, a thief who was once a courtesan who also has healer training, a warrior prince who’s versed in magical theory (who also has a bit of the elven ranger aura to him), and a prophetic monk. For mentors we see another assortment of standard folks, in particular the ambitious and aloof wizard in a tower and the warrior monk. As a companion we have the large hulking barbarian from the east who can outfight just about anyone with his bare hands. And while all of these elements blend together well and don’t come off as trite or overdone, there is sadly not enough detail or finishing touches around them to really make this a standout work.For me, this lack of storytelling polish comes from two places. First, lack of worldbuilding. Most of the description of setting and how various places in this world interact with each other comes late in the book. The origin story of the world comes late in the book. Granted, it all happens exactly where it becomes necessary to know these things. On the other hand, it makes it hard to see just how different these four characters are simply because they come from different places and different cultures. They are presented as different, but it’s on a more surface level than what a master of the genre like Brett, Weeks, or Sanderson would do. Moving further into this idea, the characters don’t interact with their environment the way I normally expect in epic fantasy, simply because the scenery hasn’t been built for them. It’s like watching a play that opens with a bare set and adds backdrops, props, and other items for characters to interact with exactly when those items are needed but not before.The second major stumbling block comes from having a book that is one third of an overall arc without having a well defined or executed arc of its own. The book ends without a real sense of resolution. Most of the quartet has met up (but not all) and an adventure party is formed, and they have what should have been the big unifying fight which brings them together as a team. Except that it came off as more of a major boss fight from a video game (understandable, given the author’s background), and didn’t really serve to pull these characters together as a team. It felt more like it was the end of the book, the author felt like something big needed to happen, something epic...and forced his characters into a bad situation in order to force ill considered decisions with grave consequences...which are left unresolved at the end of the book!So we have a book that’s about the building of a party...but doesn’t finish building the party. We have characters who don’t really relate to each other, or to their environment, and about whom we don’t know a great deal about. (You never really get to know characters well in a book that has this many point of views.) We have a world that’s been made with broad brush strokes without fine detail put in. This cumulates with a somewhat unsupported climax that feels like the author is forcing characters in a certain way against what choices may have been more natural for these characters to make.On the plus side, Karpyshyn does have a lot going for him. He is a technically good writer, and there are a lot of elements to this tale that do work very well. For all its archetypes, Karpyshyn does seem to be taking Keegan, Scythe, Vaaler, and Cassandra on an original journey with a unique magic system. His dialogue and ability to quickly transition from one point of view, culture, and conflict to the next is admirable. The book is readable and enjoyable, but has too many missing pieces for it to put Karpyshyn on the same literary level of the masters of fantasy. Children of Fire is a fairly generic fantasy, almost to the level of everyman-fantasy that Eragon is, albeit more sophisticated than that title. I can recommend it as a decent read to anyone who enjoys epic fantasy at all, but it’s not something I feel you need to spend extra effort to track down.
review 2: Pretty good stuff! Though I have to lament: doesn't anybody write done-in-one fantasy novels anymore? Everybody writes trilogies and sprawling sagas. This book is no exception, being the first of an unknown number of volumes--I'm guessing at least three since there are three talismans of Chaos mentioned. I like the characters and the basic premise. Mr. Karpyshyn has created an intriguing world and I'm definitely up for seeing where this all leads. I find myself idly wondering if two characters--Nord and Scythe--are intended at least partially as an homage to Fritz Lieber's tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Anyway, liking this series so far. less

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