TP throwbacks: Battle Magic and Melting Stones

[Kypriotha]

The last of the TP throwbacks for Emelan is a double feature: Battle Magic and Melting Stones. These prequels and sequels to Will of the Empress break the mold a bit from the previous Emelan books. Until the end of April, this is the place to share all your thoughts and theories.

[devilinthedetails]

I think that I find these two books the weakest entries in the Emelan universe albeit for different reasons. Of the two, I probably prefer Battle Magic since at least it seemed to aspire to be more even if it didn’t succeed. Now to delve into more specific thoughts by book in my usual fashion:

Battle Magic:

-At the outset, it’s pretty clear that Gyongxe is analogous to Tibet and Yanjing to China, and that Gyongxe is going to be invaded by Yanjing. The big message is we should all be very afraid of an expanding China/Yanjing. I’ll be the first to critique modern China but in a fantasy book the seems to draw more on China’s imperial era for inspiration, I would have preferred the story go in a bit of a different direction. There are just so many different dynastic eras that could have been explored that this just feels disappointing to me. So little fantasy is set in a culture based on imperial China that I just wanted this one to be done better.

-The portrayal of Yanjing and its Eastern culture is very vivid and I enjoyed it even if I wished there was less of the sense that almost everything about their culture is either humorously wrong or a moral menace. I would’ve preferred a bit more complexity in Yanjing’s depiction.

-I like Parahan as a character, and his backstory is interesting.

-Luvo and his relationship with Evvy also fascinate me.

-Jia Jiu is a more interesting antagonist to me than Weishu. She’s a powerful academic mage with a compelling mixture of charm, cleverness, and cunning. I also think it’s telling that she’s the one who orders Evvy’s torture and the killing of Evvy’s cats. In many ways, she is a better realized antagonist than Weishu because her conflict with Evvy feels more personal in that she directly wrongs Evvy.

-Weishu, by contrast, comes across as a children’s book villain that in a bit of narrative dissonance we are supposed to be envisioning as an adult book’s villain, and quite frankly, it doesn’t work for me. He is supposed to be evil incarnate but the main focus is too often on his crimes against cats and plants rather than against people (he does commit crimes against people, they just aren’t dwelled on sufficiently in my opinion) that it becomes narratively awkward at times.

-Gyongxe is a less interesting setting to me than Yanjing. It just feels like this gods blessed land with too much weird magic for the land and its people to have much emotional resonance with me. In fairness, though, I do prefer my fantasy with less divine intervention.

-I also found the plotting and pacing of this book to be a bit off. Part of the problem is I think this book suffers from what I refer to as Prequel Syndrome where too many of the major plot points have already been revealed in previous works (Will of the Empress and Melting Stones) that surprise and suspense really suffer for it.

-For instance, Evvy's capture and torture are horrifying and heartbreaking, but those familiar with the previously published Emelan works (which is most of the target audience) already knows this was going to happen and was probably even waiting for it to occur, so when it unfolds, it's not shocking in a way that it needs to be to have the full emotional punch it should.

- It also means that Pierce probably already had the major plot points planned well in advance of writing this story, so the book between the major plot points to me seems to drag a lot. Overall the pacing and structure of the book sort of reminded me of a connect-the-dots worksheet for children.

-Ultimately I like a lot of the ideas in this book--of exploring the devastating impact war can have on people--but found the execution lacking. I also was intrigued by Yanjing but found Gyongxe too boring because of its favored by the gods status.

-What is frustrating about this book is it feels like it could be more but it’s not allowed to be because it is constrained by the YA genre. It wants to be an adult book but it isn’t allowed to be and has to retain awkward elements of the childish in order to still be classified as YA. This just might not have been a story it was possible to tell as a YA book, bottom line.

-Since I do appreciate ambition, and creativity in fiction even if they don’t get executed as strongly as I would have liked, I rank Battle Magic above Melting Stones, which I find to have better execution but much weaker ideas. In a battle of ideas versus execution, I tend to favor ideas in the end.

Melting Stones:

-If Battle Magic was perhaps too adult in its ideas to be executed effectively in a YA book, Melting Stones has the opposite problem. It’s very childish in tone.

-Part of the childishness stems from Evvy, who is far more of a brat than she was in Street Magic, where I enjoyed her character a lot. She seems to have regressed in maturity since that book. Some of that might be trauma from the events in Battle Magic, but some of it might be due to the first person narrator.

-Speaking of the first person narrator, it makes this book a bit difficult for me to get into, and overall I think the book would have been better told in the third person since the third person seems to be more Tammy’s strength than first person.

-Sometimes Evvy’s childishness does work well. I find her thoughts on Master Fusspot to be endearing and amusing.

-I liked Jayat, Oswin, and Luvo. All are engaging characters.

-The hints of of the impact that the pirate queen's death in Tris' book had on her daughter add some much needed depth to the story.

-It is interesting to see what Evvy and Rosethorn were doing during Will of the Empress, but I missed the relationship between Evvy and Briar I had come to love during Street Magic. I would rather see Evvy and Briar together than Evvy and Rosethorn, to be honest.

-The fire spirits in the volcano are just annoying to me. I would have been happier if they received a lot less page time.

-Speaking of the volcano, it takes these supposedly smart mages way too long to figure out that the island (like those around it) is volcanic and about to experience an eruption. They get anvil-sized hints and can’t figure out what is hitting them over the head. Mildly frustrating to read. The plot would have been improved if the time it took the mages to figure out what was wrong was cut in half even if that made the book even thinner than it was. If the plot really is that thin, the book should be that thin as well.

-Overall, a quick, light read especially compared to Battle Magic. Not the worst book I ever read but definitely not one of Tammy’s best owing to a rather flimsy plot.

-The execution, as I noted, is better than Battle Magic, but the ideas aren’t nearly as compelling. Therefore, I rank it as the weakest entry in the Emelan universe.