I adored Joshua Phillip Johnson’s The Forever Sea, set
in a world where ships kept afloat by magical hearthfires sail an endless sea
of grass, so much that I eagerly snatched up the sequel. And ended up wishing
it had been a stand-alone.
This overly long book followed two storylines that are so
disconnected for the first three-quarters of the book, I wished it had been divided
into two separate volumes or, better yet, that the “continuing” story be cut.
By far my favorite part involves a mainland noble family, Borders, that has fallen
on hard times, both financially and politically. The power struggles of the
ruthless Emperor and the vassal barons are convoluted, rich in cultural
world-building, and full of drama. I found the loving, boisterous relationship
between youngest Borders child, Flitch, and his siblings delightful and
emotionally moving. The action gets even more gripping when, under immediate
risk of their barony being destroyed by the Emperor, Flitch’s father reveals a
secret hidden deep beneath their castle: the entrance to a realm of immensely
powerful and deadly, nonhuman magic. Everything about the “Flitch” narrative
grabbed me, from the tense action to the sweet love story between one of
Flitch’s siblings, a gifted gender-neutral artist and a charismatic librarian
from another barony, to their sister’s impulsive nature and the quiet, detail
orientation of another brother. Eventually, the family seeks refuge with a
neighbor baron, a youthful-seeming woman of extraordinary strength and madcap
humor. She may well give Flitch a run as the most enchanting character in the
book.
Meanwhile, Kindred, the heroine from the first volume,
follows up setting the grass sea on fire with scuttling her ship, thereby
sending her crew—all two of them, one of whom is her lover--to the eerie bottom
of the sea. Here, the landscape is filled with fantastical plants and
perhaps-animals, not to mention roving bands of humans eking out their
livelihood from detritus falling from the surface. Alas, until well past the
halfway point, there was so little dramatic tension in these chapters, I kept
falling asleep.
At last, most of the way through the book, the two story
lines veer toward one another when Kindred’s long-lost grandmother unleashes an
army of deep-sea monsters that threaten human life on the surface. Alas, at
this point I had lost all interest in the Kindred story, I skimmed over those
parts to get back to the dramatic adventures of Flitch and his family. For me, past
midway is far too late to introduce a reason to care about these characters and
way, way too late for a hint that the two stories will at some nebulous point
in the future come together (and they don’t, except in a deus ex machina
sort of way). I kept reading on the strength of the first volume, but I don’t
see how a reader new to this series would make any sense of it. Which is too
bad because The Forever Sea is a really, really cool world. And Flitch's story is magnificent.
No comments:
Post a Comment