Imagine you are a teenager, maybe just starting college. And you’ve been raised in the traditional American Christian mindset, the one that is so generic and ubiquitous that if you tried to imagine a painting of it, we’d have more or less the same painting in mind. But you’re at college now, away from your old life and on your own for really the first time. And your roommate is a Wiccan, and after you get over the exotic amusement, you start talking a lot, and damned if the Wiccan isn’t saying a lot of stuff you’re interested in. A few minutes later[1], bam, you have a full-blown conversion experience, you love Mother Gaia, you worship in the moonlight in the center of the quad, and you’re certainly naked when you do it. You hug trees, not to conform to a filthy hippy stereotype so much as because you genuinely feel connected to each and every one of them. This is for reals the best experience of your life, and it’s aggravating how people are rolling their eyes at you and trying to get you to chill out with all the “We are one” talk, and even your Wiccan roommate feels like you’ve gone overboard.
Okay. Got it?
That person, I think, is who wrote The Wayfarer Redemption. About a thousand years ago, humans got proselytized into cutting down all the trees and plowing the world into flat and perfect order, because the people who hang out in the trees with little horns on their heads and the ones who hang out in the mountains with wings are evil and in fact Forbidden and need to be kept away from humans, and cutting down all their trees is a good way to go about it. Except now there are frozen ghost dudes and a monster-guy named Gorgrael leading them, and there’s a prophecy that says a lot of people have to do a lot of things, like throwing off the shackles of their oppressive religion and teaming up with the Forbiddens, learning to love trees and talk to stags and embrace the Mother[2] and also find each other terribly attractive and fall in love on pretty much that basis alone. It’s fairly generic fantasy pulp that is mostly saved by the bad guys being somewhat cool. On the downside, the writing is iffy and feels like a first book, in that there’s way too much telling about peoples’ motivations instead of showing. Both plot and writing improved as the story progressed, though I’m not sure it got enough better to carry a trilogy.[3] I most likely would not have finished it, except it was recommended to me and I felt the obligation. Still, it was getting better instead of worse, so there’s every chance I’ll read the next one.
[1] Or maybe a few weeks? Things change fast in college, it could be either one.
[2] Sadly, not a euphemism.
[3] P.S. This is the first book of a trilogy.
As with all people, sometimes I do things that I find embarrassing, and wouldn’t really want other people to know about. I collect