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A review by laurencerussell
The Sons of Thestian by M.E. Vaughan
3.0
In a sea of YA books about witches and wizards, The Harmatia Cycle covers something in Celtic lore that I appreciate much more and wish there was more of in modern fiction: fairies.
The world of the mythic forest spirits of Celtic and Gaelic mythology is a deep well, and goes well utilised in The Sons of Thestian, from eerie Corrigan to beguiling Gancanagh, and leaves me wanting much, much more.
STORY
The book starts on a fantastic high, something which urged me to buy it the second I skimmed the first few pages. Mingling danger and mystery, the threat of the night patrol sets an bloodcurdling tone which had me enamoured. Devastatingly, the book doesn't really use these shapechanging nightmare monsters again, after teasing you with them in the prologue, and the story of Harmatia drags it's feet pretty much all the way up to the end, and the night patrol remains more or less unexplored.
This is because after the prologue another book begins, which is about running into the woods and wandering around there, waiting for things to happen. This second book is only thinly connected to Harmatia and the night patrol, and makes use of an entirely different tone, leaving behind the intriguing gothic, horror aesthetic we started with to give you a much, much milder ride with bandits™. The appearance of the ghostly, sadistic corrigan represent a jarring return to where we started, but it's short lived.
The arrival in Sarrin dripped with good vibes and warmth, dragging me away from the long forgotten cold of the night patrol to read about simple joys and rare pleasures. In Sarrin, narratives of friendship, loss, belonging, love, and affirmation rule. Again, this change in tone blindsides you utterly and doesn't feel deserved, but I forgave it completely because of how wonderful these sections felt, and how rare these beautiful concepts and feelings were in a YA fantasy story.
Unfortunately the sickly sweet taste of Sarrin gets old after a hundred pages of it, and starts to poison the book's three act structure. Dramatic climaxes in Sarrin feel forced and sudden because they're so unnatural there. As the third act dips into a harvest festival chapter filled with joyous children and sugary sweets, the book starts to feel like a kind of reverse Lord of the Rings, where Frodo left his dark, horrifying home of Mordor to hang out in the lovely shire and hide from his problems until they show up all of a sudden.
The ending returns us to Harmatia, as if the plot of this city we barely remember after 400 odd pages were highly relevant all along, including its academy of Magi we barely got to know and the evil queen antagonist™ so bland I forgot her name.
CHARACTERS
The overarching plot of the book doesn't seem to be a focus of the book, and whilst I've been very critical of it, I took a lot of enjoyment in immersing myself in the characters as they wandered, as blissfully unaware of the plot as the reader is. Rufus and Jionathan are charming, and their intriguing romp is enchanting, especially in Sarrin.
Although I am perturbed by the friendship these two share. Jionatan and Rufus are best friends, but we're never told why. We're just told they are, then they affectionately insult one another or yell at each other, then one of them scrapes their knee and the other one almost goes into cardiac arrest with worry.
It's this big love/hate relationship, but all the love is implied, or you're led to believe it was established off the page. From the opening chapters when they're risking their lives for one another to the very end this dynamic is saturated into the bones of the book, but it doesn't feel any deeper 500 pages in than it did when I began. They hate each other in jest or for a single, passionate scene, but there's this thin veneer of unexplained love underneath that reeks of YA cliche of the two boys that are extremely close. This friendship begins ringing hollower and hollower when the characters continued to dislike almost everything about the other, and they keep screwing each other over.
Fae was such a legolas archetype it hurt. I've heard people have been upset with her relationship with Jionathan, but Jionathan came off as about 14 to me, so I never took their relationship seriously at any point.
Luca was fine as a side character that tumbled into the mix half way in. I say this because she wasn't around for as long as the other three but made strong impressions while she was on the page. She was a gutsy, talented, gay gal who wasn't afraid of hard work, and nothing really grated on me as much as with the other characters.
OTHER BITS
Whilst it unfortunately isn't a strong focus of the book, magic felt quite technical and almost scientific. Creating vacuums and water whips left me wondering what else was possible with magic, but there aren't many opportunities to explore it, and it feels like another interesting theme that I was sad to see taking a back seat
This next part isn't a enormous flaw with the book, it's just a little frustration of mine. dark skinned is not a race. I've seen this book ambitiously described as diverse, when the Rosignols feel like a family that was created white, then darkened to fit a diversity quota. There's no mention of their ancestry that can be traced back to foreign lands with a rich culture that the family upholds to this day, or any mention of non European features. They collect apples, play Celtic music and dress up to look like European lords and ladies. This would be fine if there were anything about them at all that distinguished their race other than a couple of mentions that they have "dark skin". On the page this comes off as cultural erasure, as the Rosignols sometimes feel whiter than anyone else in the book. Again, this isn't a horribly racist crime, it just felt like the bare minimum for diversity, and I couldn't help but wish Sarrin were in a far off continent that Fae teleported them all to.
I'm a fan of Ms. Vaughan's and although this book wasn't quite for me, I look forward to what she does next.
The world of the mythic forest spirits of Celtic and Gaelic mythology is a deep well, and goes well utilised in The Sons of Thestian, from eerie Corrigan to beguiling Gancanagh, and leaves me wanting much, much more.
STORY
The book starts on a fantastic high, something which urged me to buy it the second I skimmed the first few pages. Mingling danger and mystery, the threat of the night patrol sets an bloodcurdling tone which had me enamoured. Devastatingly, the book doesn't really use these shapechanging nightmare monsters again, after teasing you with them in the prologue, and the story of Harmatia drags it's feet pretty much all the way up to the end, and the night patrol remains more or less unexplored.
This is because after the prologue another book begins, which is about running into the woods and wandering around there, waiting for things to happen. This second book is only thinly connected to Harmatia and the night patrol, and makes use of an entirely different tone, leaving behind the intriguing gothic, horror aesthetic we started with to give you a much, much milder ride with bandits™. The appearance of the ghostly, sadistic corrigan represent a jarring return to where we started, but it's short lived.
The arrival in Sarrin dripped with good vibes and warmth, dragging me away from the long forgotten cold of the night patrol to read about simple joys and rare pleasures. In Sarrin, narratives of friendship, loss, belonging, love, and affirmation rule. Again, this change in tone blindsides you utterly and doesn't feel deserved, but I forgave it completely because of how wonderful these sections felt, and how rare these beautiful concepts and feelings were in a YA fantasy story.
Unfortunately the sickly sweet taste of Sarrin gets old after a hundred pages of it, and starts to poison the book's three act structure. Dramatic climaxes in Sarrin feel forced and sudden because they're so unnatural there. As the third act dips into a harvest festival chapter filled with joyous children and sugary sweets, the book starts to feel like a kind of reverse Lord of the Rings, where Frodo left his dark, horrifying home of Mordor to hang out in the lovely shire and hide from his problems until they show up all of a sudden.
The ending returns us to Harmatia, as if the plot of this city we barely remember after 400 odd pages were highly relevant all along, including its academy of Magi we barely got to know and the evil queen antagonist™ so bland I forgot her name.
CHARACTERS
The overarching plot of the book doesn't seem to be a focus of the book, and whilst I've been very critical of it, I took a lot of enjoyment in immersing myself in the characters as they wandered, as blissfully unaware of the plot as the reader is. Rufus and Jionathan are charming, and their intriguing romp is enchanting, especially in Sarrin.
Although I am perturbed by the friendship these two share. Jionatan and Rufus are best friends, but we're never told why. We're just told they are, then they affectionately insult one another or yell at each other, then one of them scrapes their knee and the other one almost goes into cardiac arrest with worry.
It's this big love/hate relationship, but all the love is implied, or you're led to believe it was established off the page. From the opening chapters when they're risking their lives for one another to the very end this dynamic is saturated into the bones of the book, but it doesn't feel any deeper 500 pages in than it did when I began. They hate each other in jest or for a single, passionate scene, but there's this thin veneer of unexplained love underneath that reeks of YA cliche of the two boys that are extremely close. This friendship begins ringing hollower and hollower when the characters continued to dislike almost everything about the other, and they keep screwing each other over.
Fae was such a legolas archetype it hurt. I've heard people have been upset with her relationship with Jionathan, but Jionathan came off as about 14 to me, so I never took their relationship seriously at any point.
Luca was fine as a side character that tumbled into the mix half way in. I say this because she wasn't around for as long as the other three but made strong impressions while she was on the page. She was a gutsy, talented, gay gal who wasn't afraid of hard work, and nothing really grated on me as much as with the other characters.
OTHER BITS
Whilst it unfortunately isn't a strong focus of the book, magic felt quite technical and almost scientific. Creating vacuums and water whips left me wondering what else was possible with magic, but there aren't many opportunities to explore it, and it feels like another interesting theme that I was sad to see taking a back seat
This next part isn't a enormous flaw with the book, it's just a little frustration of mine. dark skinned is not a race. I've seen this book ambitiously described as diverse, when the Rosignols feel like a family that was created white, then darkened to fit a diversity quota. There's no mention of their ancestry that can be traced back to foreign lands with a rich culture that the family upholds to this day, or any mention of non European features. They collect apples, play Celtic music and dress up to look like European lords and ladies. This would be fine if there were anything about them at all that distinguished their race other than a couple of mentions that they have "dark skin". On the page this comes off as cultural erasure, as the Rosignols sometimes feel whiter than anyone else in the book. Again, this isn't a horribly racist crime, it just felt like the bare minimum for diversity, and I couldn't help but wish Sarrin were in a far off continent that Fae teleported them all to.
I'm a fan of Ms. Vaughan's and although this book wasn't quite for me, I look forward to what she does next.