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A review by tasharobinson
The Far West by Patricia C. Wrede
4.0
This whole series is so interesting to me. There's virtually no conflict — in this book, the only real significant problem happens 30 pages from the end. The biggest drama is the protagonist enduring her mother and older sisters being kinda nosy and nagging, forcing her to gently tell them off a bit. There's a love triangle, which consists of one man politely proposing to the protagonist and stiffly but cordially taking no for an answer, and another man being a friendly but often distant presence. This is not an edge-of-the-seat kind of book.
Instead, it's a dense and pure world-building book. This trilogy creates an alternative America, where past settlers have created a great magical barrier between the east and the west, to keep out the dangerous magical creatures that live in the Western lands, ranging from mammoths to dragons. This third book in the trilogy involves an expedition out west, where a large group of characters deals with new wildlife and learns more about magic. The characters are calm, rational, and exploratory, and so is the book itself. Most of the story is just adding new things to the world — new discoveries about the magic system, new discoveries about biology and geography, new things about the characters.
It's possible that this shouldn't be so compelling, but it is. I'm fascinated because it's so interesting and absorbing, and I'm fascinated because the main character is so unconventional. She's a young woman with spectacular powers that no one else has… and no one makes a big deal about it. She's a research assistant, and when her way of looking at magic revolutionizes everyone's theories, no one flips out and starts deferring to her and makes her their leader, they're pretty much like, "Okay, that was interesting, let's discuss the mathematics of what you just did, and also the notes the biologists have been taken need to be recopied." The society all this takes place in is very regimented and organized and hierarchical, and she doesn't wildly upend it, and it isn't dystopian and fascistic and overbearing. She's just… a young woman with a job to do, and even after she comes back from the dangerous expedition where she upends reality, she has to think about what she's going to do for a living, and whether she's going to go on living with her parents and their giant family, and do chores and babysit the grandkids.
In other words, there's just a level-headed calm to this series that's not like anything else I've read, and that makes magic seem both fascinating and complicated, and like just another aspect of a world. I wish there were more books in this series, because they're such a worthwhile illustration of how to build a big, rich, unique fantasy world while ignoring all the predictable tropes and going your own way.
Instead, it's a dense and pure world-building book. This trilogy creates an alternative America, where past settlers have created a great magical barrier between the east and the west, to keep out the dangerous magical creatures that live in the Western lands, ranging from mammoths to dragons. This third book in the trilogy involves an expedition out west, where a large group of characters deals with new wildlife and learns more about magic. The characters are calm, rational, and exploratory, and so is the book itself. Most of the story is just adding new things to the world — new discoveries about the magic system, new discoveries about biology and geography, new things about the characters.
It's possible that this shouldn't be so compelling, but it is. I'm fascinated because it's so interesting and absorbing, and I'm fascinated because the main character is so unconventional. She's a young woman with spectacular powers that no one else has… and no one makes a big deal about it. She's a research assistant, and when her way of looking at magic revolutionizes everyone's theories, no one flips out and starts deferring to her and makes her their leader, they're pretty much like, "Okay, that was interesting, let's discuss the mathematics of what you just did, and also the notes the biologists have been taken need to be recopied." The society all this takes place in is very regimented and organized and hierarchical, and she doesn't wildly upend it, and it isn't dystopian and fascistic and overbearing. She's just… a young woman with a job to do, and even after she comes back from the dangerous expedition where she upends reality, she has to think about what she's going to do for a living, and whether she's going to go on living with her parents and their giant family, and do chores and babysit the grandkids.
In other words, there's just a level-headed calm to this series that's not like anything else I've read, and that makes magic seem both fascinating and complicated, and like just another aspect of a world. I wish there were more books in this series, because they're such a worthwhile illustration of how to build a big, rich, unique fantasy world while ignoring all the predictable tropes and going your own way.