Review: The Frith Chronicles: ARC I

The Frith Chronicles: ARC I by Shami Stovall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This hits my Deserves Better Editing Goodreads shelf, because it's a well-told story with an appealing protagonist, but the copy editing is scruffy (especially the first book).

The protagonist, Volke, was my favourite feature, and made up for some other weaknesses. He's a genuinely good and honest person, who has absorbed the life lessons of his excellent adoptive father and is seen by everyone around him as the reliable one, though he is still young and makes a young man's mistakes from time to time. He's determined to prove that his parents, who were both criminals, don't define him, and he does that very well through a series of exciting and varied challenges, including fighting pirates, contending in arena battles, and attempting to track down and foil the source of a magical plague.

There's quite a complicated love polyhedron among the young cast. Zaxis, the annoying rich boy jock (who gradually learns to be a partially decent person and a good fighter who thinks as well as acts), likes Illia, Volke's adoptive sister; so, I suspect, does her friend Hexa, though as at the end of the book Hexa hasn't said anything yet, and maybe that will never become anything (a good many potential threads never develop). Illia likes Volke, but he sees her as a sister. Atty, the privileged girl from their island who is always expected to be perfect, likes Volke too, and vice versa, but they're both shy about it and the relationship is very slow to develop. And Zaxis, the last of the group of six apprentices, doesn't seem to want any romantic relationship, least of all the marriage his awful, distant, demanding parents have arranged for him (though that, too, is a thread that, as of the end of Book 3, has dropped out of sight).

The world is an interesting and, as far as I'm aware, original one, in which humans become arcanists (able to practice magic) by bonding to any of a large number of mystical creatures, who are then able to mature, making the relationship mutually beneficial. Supposedly, the arcanist and their eldrin (bonded creature) become more like each other as they work together, though that's something we're told rather than shown. Illia's eldrin, an amusingly self-aggrandizing little ferretlike being, is nothing like her, and she doesn't become boastful or bombastic either. The other eldrin mostly don't have much personality, including Volke's, which, given that Volke is the main character, is a bit of a fault. The human characters (other than Volke) deepen very slowly for the most part, and the worldbuilding does the same; we do learn more about how the human/eldrin relationship works, and that some eldrin breed like natural creatures while others are magically created under specific circumstances, but the world still feels more like scenery flats than a fully realized setting. The creatures include mythical monsters from very specific cultural backgrounds in our world, which is occasionally jarring, as well as a few completely made-up ones.

I reviewed the first book on Netgalley before it was published, and took that opportunity to point out a number of copy editing issues (mostly missing past perfect tense, which is a particular weakness of the author). Some seem to have been corrected subsequently, perhaps because of that feedback - but perhaps not, since several of the same errors (like "hydra's" used for a non-possessive plural) are still there.

The second and third books are somewhat better, though there are still some issues with apostrophes in plural words, and a few basic homonym or near-homonym errors, including the classic "horde" for "hoard". A good many dangling modifiers, too.

All of which means that, although I do enjoy them and want to continue reading the series, I will be waiting for them to be on sale, since (for me) they are overpriced for books that lack polish in their copy editing and don't deepen the characters or setting very much over the course of three books. They are fun, though, and make it to the bronze tier of my Best of the Year list for 2022.

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