Book Log 72/2016 - Den Patrick: The Boy with the Porcelain Blade - Erebus Sequence #1

[jacey]

I’d heard very good things about this book, so I was a little disappointed that it didn’t live up to its hype. There was much to admire, but also things that rankled. I’ve lost track of the number of times Lucien, our hero, was knocked unconscious, for instance. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Set in the sprawling castle of Demesne in the kingdom of Landfall, Lucien is an Orfano, one of the despised and feared, yet privileged Orfani (orphans, geddit?) who are all deformed in some way—born different—but not imbued with any special powers as far as I can tell. Raised in the castle and given the best education in all things, including martial arts, the Orfani are neither one thing nor the other. Set against each other by the system of annual testing, their lives are constantly in danger, from each other as well as from factions who should be protecting them (the mysterious Major Domo and one particularly vicious teacher).

Lucien’s story is told in two separate timelines: from his fateful testing at eighteen and what follows, interspersed with chapters from his childhood, filling us in on the backstory. He’s a lonely little boy who grows up into a lonely young man. He’s desperately concerned with his deformity (lack of external ears, though it doesn’t seem to affect his hearing). Much of this book is concerned with the origins of the Orfani and what Lucien discovers causes an eventual confrontation with the mad king and his Major Domo. The alternating chapters don’t really work for me. Breaking the forward narrative to leap back to a childhood incident pulled me out of the story. I could have done without the flashbacks altogether. Each one made a point or added information, but this could have been covered by a brief summary.

The setting is vaguely Italian Renaissance, delivered mostly via the names and the occasional swear word, yet nothing seems to exist beyond the island kingdom of Landfall. There’s no trade, no diplomatic missions, no sense of geography. We are given an origin myth which involves a ship landing and sleepers being woken, which hints at spacefarers being woken from coldsleep by the person who becomes the king, but it’s never followed through, so maybe this is foreshadowing for a future book, since this seems to be the first in a sequence. Is it possible that Landfall is the only human settlement on an earth-type planet?

Received from Netgalley in return for a review.

Comments

[sheff-dogs.livejournal.com]

So would you recommend reading each timeline in it's entirety rather than flipping back and forth?

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

Good question. You'd obviously have to start with the childhood chapters, but I'm not sure there's enough in them to carry half the book. But, of course, reading it as a linear sequence was not the author's intention, so I couldn't recommend something so radical. It would be an interesting experiment, though a bit tricky to do on an ordinary kindle.

I did wonder whether if just reading the later chapters and missing out the childhood ones would offer a complete story. I suspect there are a few things in the childhood chapters that help to make sense of the later ones.

I'm still feeling a bit disappointed. I so wanted to love this book wholeheartedly. Maybe I should wait a few months and then go back and read both sequences on their own.