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First-time author defies fantasy conventions
Doug Barbour, Edmonton Journal (Mar. 16, 2003)
Caitlin Sweet’s first novel, A Telling of Stars, takes a number of conventional fantasy expectations and turns them on their heads, in the process telling a quest tale that has the feel of an ancient folk lay. It’s a fine, intensely sensual novel, the writing full of keenly observed sense perceptions and shifting emotions.
It’s a feminine epic, and part of its power is the way it proves that term no oxymoron. Like many epic quest stories, it begins in the protagonist’s childhood and follows her through her growing pains. But here the pains come all at once and propel her on a journey terribly unlike those most quest fantasies offer.
Jaele is a happy child, growing up with her younger brother and her parents beside the sea, listening to all her father’s stories of Queen Galha and her utter defeat of the terrible Sea Raiders, so many generations ago. Only one small event interrupts her childhood, the day when she is six that a young boy running away from another village meets her on her beach. He tells her he must continue, and runs away from her too, but she doesn’t forget him.
When she is 18, Sea Raiders attack her home while she is out in the harbour. Watching them kill her mother and her father, and then leave the man who slit her mother’s throat behind, she starts to chase him, and soon is following him into the forest, along the road that leads to the Queen’s city.
But this is just the beginning of her adventures. Jaele is filled with the need for revenge, and she determines to follow the Sea Raider, who will slowly die as he crosses the country, to his own land if she must. Along the way, she feels sure, she will gather companions to accompany her on her quest, just the way such tales always work out.
It does not happen. She does meet many different people, tells them something of her tale, but either they refuse to join her or they choose to do so only to be somehow prevented. She also meets the young boy again, and becomes his lover, yet cannot convince him to come with her, nor discover just what drives him in his wanderings.
But the narrative is only a way for Sweet to enter into the mind and emotions of a young woman desperately trying to find a place in a world that was so torn apart. Jaele is a feisty hero: impetuous, naive, passionate, willful, compassionate, changing. Learning much more about both the world and herself as she journeys, eventually she discovers how futile revenge is, something others have warned her about but that she can only discover on her own.
A Telling of Stars keeps defeating expectations while holding he reader’s attention, especially through its wonderfully particular descriptions and sensual evocations of the various landscapes and their people through whom Jaele travels. It’s a strong first novel that should have readers waiting for Sweet’s next.
A Telling of Stars - Review 1
