The Dark Moon: The Guardian Cycle Book One

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps too juvenile for adults
Review: In interest of full disclosure, I only read half the book. The guys at the local fantasy/scifi store who have directed me to phenomenal books strongly recommended this one. They have great taste, so they obviously saw something here I did not.

I have two criticisms of the book, which may be idiosyncratic to me. First, I have very low tolerance for fantasy books whose protagonists have child or adolescent characters who --surprise-- rise to greatness. I find the formula tiresome, and since I am an adult, I don't really relate to them. (In fact, I didn't relate to them when I was young either.) I much prefer to have a novel written from the point of view of strong characters (like Berg's Transformation trilogy). So I found it grating that after a hundred pages, I had gotten little more than a repetitive, utterly typical description of the friendship of three children in an orphanage who find an important book. My second criticism is that after reading Berg's trilogy and Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, I had little patience with Gray's writing style, which I found simplistic with characters out of central casting all of whom fulfill their 2-dimensional roles.

I'm not sure who the intended audience is for the book. I wouldn't hesitate to read this to children as a bedtime story. The language is easily understood and the story is imaginative. But it was a great disappointment to me as an adult reader.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps too juvenile for adults
Review: In interest of full disclosure, I only read half the book. The guys at the local fantasy/scifi store who have directed me to phenomenal books strongly recommended this one. They have great taste, so they obviously saw something here I did not.

I have two criticisms of the book, which may be idiosyncratic to me. First, I have very low tolerance for fantasy books whose protagonists have child or adolescent characters who --surprise-- rise to greatness. I find the formula tiresome, and since I am an adult, I don't really relate to them. (In fact, I didn't relate to them when I was young either.) I much prefer to have a novel written from the point of view of strong characters (like Berg's Transformation trilogy). So I found it grating that after a hundred pages, I had gotten little more than a repetitive, utterly typical description of the friendship of three children in an orphanage who find an important book. My second criticism is that after reading Berg's trilogy and Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series, I had little patience with Gray's writing style, which I found simplistic with characters out of central casting all of whom fulfill their 2-dimensional roles.

I'm not sure who the intended audience is for the book. I wouldn't hesitate to read this to children as a bedtime story. The language is easily understood and the story is imaginative. But it was a great disappointment to me as an adult reader.

Rating:
Summary: Pleasantly surprising.
Review: This is the first book in The Guardian Cycle pentalogy (before The Jasper Forest, The Crystal Desert, The Red Glacier and Alyssa's Ring).

In Makhaya, on the Floating Islands, Empress Adina is about to give birth to her first heir. As prophecied in the Tindaya Code, a child born under a special lunar conjuction, the alignment of the Red, White, Amber and Dark Moons, is to become the Guardian, the hero that will save the world from a terrible disaster supposed to happen on the next alignment, seventy-five years later. But children born under this conjunction are usually crippled, and when the infant is finally extracted from his mother's womb, what a relief it is to see that he is in perfect health. However the Empress's joy doesn't last long, as she realizes her labour is not over yet, and gives birth to a second, badly misshapen child with strange glittering eyes. Believing this twin is an ill omen, and the incarnation of evil, she orders him to be taken away, his existence kept secret forever.

Fourteen years later, the crippled boy Terrel is living in a madhouse in Havenmoon with his friends Alyssa, a girl who can see into other people's dreams, and Elam, a young boy who's been arrested for stealing potatoes when the moon conjunction was not right for harvesting. Indeed, the whole Floating Island society is dictated by the Seers, astrologers who set up rules and taboos, according to the positions, waxings and wanings of the four moons. Their task is also to calculate the timing of the numerous earthquakes caused by the moons.

One day though, a strange, unexplained earth tremor occurs, opening a breach in the wall of Havenmoon's abandoned necropolis. Terrel and his friends go and explore the forbidden cemetary, where they find an old observatory and a library. Soon after this event, Terrel recieves his first visit in fourteen years. It is Shahan, a Seer of Makhaya, who tells him about the Prophecy of the Guardian, in which he believes Terrel might have a role to play. The boy also learns that due to the last earthquake, the Dark Moon has apparently left its orbit and that as a result, the next alignment should occur sooner than expected.

As another consequence, soldiers are now arresting everyone who's breaking a taboo under the new conjunction, as well as everyone who would have if the moons hadn't moved, and soon Havenmoon is crammed with prisoners. One day, soldiers try to rape Alyssa, but she defends herself with strange invisible forces. Believing she's a witch, they lock her up in a dungeon cell. When the old necropolis is about to be filled with prisoners, Terrel wants to save the books he found there. He and Elam manage to get out of the madhouse after cerfew, and on their way back, Terrel wants to check on his friend Alyssa. But Elam is caught, and Terrel has no choice but to escape if he wants to survive. In a dream that night, Terrel promises Alyssa that he'll come back to save her.

Looking for food and shelter in the countryside is not easy, the more so as Terrel often scares people off with his crippled right arm and leg and strange eyes. But realizing that he can feel earthquakes before they actually happen, he uses this strange ability to help a farmer save his herd. Finally accepted as farm hand, he then works another miracle and helps a cow and her calf in a difficult delivery. However, people start to become suspicious. Could he be the Enchanter from the legends? And when one night, Terrel is caught talking to an owl, he knows he can no longer stay on the farm.

The owl's mind was in fact controlled by Alyssa. Having the intuition that Terrel has a great part to play for the future of the Floating Islands, and having heard of rumours of a monster killing miners in Betancuria, she urges him to go there.

As you can guess by the length of this introduction, many unexpected twists and turns happen in The Dark Moon. In this first volume, we follow Terrel as he makes his way to the mines, meeting a pedlar who teaches him how to disguise his eyes using the "glamour", then travelling with a troupe of actors, all the while accompanied by Alyssa in the form of various animals, learning about what he's supposed to do once he gets there. And meanwhile in Makhaya, the Seers are calculating the new positions of the moons, as Prince Jax and his mother Adina's thirst for power is growing.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book. I was expecting more straightforward Sword & Sorcery fantasy, but it's actually pretty well written and full of interesting and likeable characters. The story hooks you right from the first page on, and until the last one. I noticed I have a tendency to love Orphan Boy & Prophecy plots, and once again, I thoroughly enjoyed this one.

Rating:
Summary: Unremarkable
Review: While _The Dark Moon_ has a promising premise - an empire of floating islands, ruled by traditions associated with the alignments of four moons, on the verge of apocalypse and featuring at least one major character of questionable sanity - the novel soon squanders its appeal with poor writing, inconsistent plotting, and tired fantasy cliche. There's a prophecy, a saviour, some ill-defined magic, and a long-lost prince. It is entertaining in places, but too many pages are wasted in superfluous and slightly dull escapades, and unnecessary character introspection which rather forgets the show-not-tell maxim.

The writing is occasionally clumsy, overindulging in adverbs (particularly to describe manners of speech when the dialogue itself ought to convey the point). Small but irritating illogicalities abound: we are told in one chapter that inmates of the madhouse are tattooed to mark them if they try to escape - and then, a few chapters and not a great deal of journeying later, that the people in the village Terrel reaches don't recognise the symbol. Alyssa is an interesting character, but Terrel is not (and few of the people he encounters stand out as more than stock figures); the villains are little more than cartoons.

On the plus side, there are certain brave attempts to break the pseudo-medieval mode, with discussions of scientific technique and advances in knowledge (although several of the conversations putting this across verge smack of inelegant info-dumping). Given a little more development and colour, the setting could prove to be an intriguing one.

Overall, this feels like too little material stretched to fill 500-odd pages, in which excess words fail to compensate for poor characterisation and an ill-thought-through world. A shame.