WAYNE'S 2024 BOOKS: BOOK 11

From the Forest
by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

Okay, this is book 23 in L. E. Modesitt Jr.'s Saga of Recluse, so if you don't know what I'm talking about you can either skip this review... or maybe you just found yourself with a whole mess of new books to read. The Saga of Recluse is fantasy that skews a little differently from most; there's magic, but it's more like bending from Avatar than book-learned wizarding, and there's heroes, but they're more likely to me craftspeople than sword-swingers. Okay, some of them are swordspeople or soldiers, but it's a rare series where a carpenter or cooper gets top billing as the protagonist.

There's a kind of sameness to each of the books in the series. Most of the protagonists are male, most are young, and most have a serious demeanour that lends itself to introspection and quiet attention to detail. You may be forgiven for wondering if talent with order and chaos - the two powers that fuel the magic in the world - tends to manifest in characters that are perhaps a little away from the vanilla end of the autism spectrum. Order mages and chaos wizards butt heads in a Jedi/Sith kind of way, men are usually bastards unless they're a main character, and the plot usually wombles along with the protagonist developing shiny new powers before engaging in an apocalyptic finale with a high body count.

That's not to say the books are bad, but there are definite and deep furrows that each book follows. I tend to read them for the slow development of the world's timeline - the publishing order is not the chronological order - and to see what new tweaks on order/chaos Modesitt Jr. can squeeze out of his story. I've read 23 books in the series, so either there's something entertaining about them, or I'm a very slow learner about what constitutes a good book.

Oh, that's right. This is a book review, not a series review. This book introduces a new character, Alayiakal, and takes us back further into the past than any of the preceeding novels. Alayiakal is a Mirror Lancer (think cavalryman with a laser lance) in the empire of Cyador. He slowly develops his order/chaos powers, and at the end (not quite spoiler alert because this happens in literally every one of the Saga of Recluse books) there's a big fight with a spectacular new use of magery that slaughters a heap of people at the end. I can't wait to see the creative ways Alayiakal finds to kill people in the future, as his story will continue for the next three books in the Saga.

Oh, and the cover to From the Forest was perhaps the least interesting I've seen on any of the Saga books. I've seen some bland and/or unrepresentative drek on the covers of this series, but this one looked like someone used generative AI with the prompt: "Give me something really uninspiring involving a forest and a wall" and then send it straight to the printer.

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