Book Review: Tanya Huff's Into the Broken Lands

 Into the Broken Lands, by Tanya Huff (DAW)

Tanya Huff is a seasoned, multi-genre author whose work never ceases to amaze me with its sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and sheer drama. She’s as prolific as she is versatile, both with her many long-running series and her stand-alone novels. Into the Broken Lands introduces a completely new world and characters. The set-up is familiar to fantasy readers: generations ago, mages intoxicated by their own limitless powers shattered the laws of nature and reality, resulting in their own demise and a landscape of magical impossibilities, The Broken Lands. Since then, the royal heirs of Marsan, greatest of the surviving human realms, venture into The Broken Lands in search of the fuel for an ever-burning flame and their own legitimacy as rulers.

Here, Huff does something both challenging and brilliant: she weaves together two such journeys, one in the present and the other, a couple of generations ago. At first, the two seem disjoint, the past being no more than prolog to the present. As the two sets of characters venture deeper into the perilous Broken Lands, both similarities and differences echo and build on one another. Eventually, the fate of the earlier expedition shapes the present, and the present offers redemption for what has come before. The unifying elements include records kept by the first expedition, taken as reverential gospel, and the discovery of how scholars have selectively edited them, horrendous dangers that are repeated with unpredictable variations, and a single character: the sole surviving weapon of the mages, without which no heir can reach the source of the fuel and return safely. Only the weapon isn’t a thing, an “it;” the weapon is a person, a giant rock-like female warrior who had been enslaved and imprisoned until a healer, a member of the first party, saw her as a person.

Into the Broken Lands is understandably character-fueled, although there is plenty of action, escalating tension, and mystery in the story. At its core, however, the story allows us to examine key questions. What is a person—and how does one become a person? What is the redemptive power of love? What is the role of knowledge and is there such a thing as knowledge free from ethics? While an entertaining story filled with bizarre magic and compelling characters, it is at its heart a story of love and grief. Exceptionally well done!