Auraria by Tab StephensMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This reads very much like a translated Japanese light novel, the kind that often gets adapted to anime or manga: the names, the tropes, the setting, the prose all remind me of that genre. That means that if you're looking for a Western-style fantasy novel, it may seem a little off. It's also a first novel, and that shows; the craft needs some work, and even in a genre that tends towards cliché, it's not the most original thing I ever read.
Having said that, the enjoyment that light novels provide is in the likeable characters and their bombastic adventures, and there it's perfectly sound. There's even some character development.
Some of what follows could be considered minor spoilers, but most of that is either in the blurb or completely predictable.
Let's talk about the names, tropes, setting and prose for a bit. The names, as is often the case both in light novels and in fantasy generally, don't have any kind of coherent scheme to them. In the royal family of the kingdom of Lladros (which sounds Welsh), the king is Friedrich (Germanic), and his three children are Sarai (Hebrew) and Logan and Miller (a Scottish and an English surname, respectively, which sound like a couple of millennial or Gen Z brothers). I had particular trouble believing in a prince called Miller, especially because the nobility in this book are mostly very snooty towards commoners; this is one of the ways you can tell the good nobles from the bad nobles, not that it's difficult to do so in general. The place names are equally inconsistent in their origin.
Apart from a few villains, by the way, being a named character confers plot armour like a Sherman tank; a lot of innocents are killed by the bad guys in the course of the book, but they are all nameless and faceless.
Moving on to tropes, the heroes are massively OP, able to use vast amounts of magic, fight off dozens of enemies, build a thick defensive wall around a village in a week, ride dragons, and righteously burn the entire estate of a villainous noble with literally the power of the surface of the sun. One of the OP heroes is a transmigrator, a person from our world (the exact form this takes is one of the few original things; (view spoiler)). As already mentioned, the good nobles care for the common people and have great plans for their prosperity and development. There's a threat from a Demon King stirring. There's the concept of an international, non-partisan Adventurers(') Guild. We're told that polygamy is commonly accepted among nobles, although we're not shown anyone actually practicing it (I've noticed that in most Japanese fantasy stories where this is a trope, only the main character actually practices polygamy, however common it's supposed to be).
The setting is your standard JRPG version of sword and sorcery, with goblins, wolves, ogres, giants, dragons, centaurs, elves, dwarves, halflings, earth magic, etc., though beast people, a staple of Japanese-style fantasy, are missing. Magic can do all kinds of convenient things, notably including providing instantaneous communication over a distance, which is helpful when characters are separated.
This-world references, including slang phrases and quotes from movies, often find their way into the mouths of people who are not transmigrators. The prose itself is basic, sometimes (especially early on) very inclined to tell instead of showing; at least one entire chapter goes by with no dialog and only summaries of events. We get near-meaningless cliché phrases like "Failure is not an option". The commas and apostrophes are at least in the right places, apart from the fact that there are no apostrophes in some phrases that I would punctuate as "Merchants' Guild" and the like; you could make an argument for those phrases having no apostrophe, and at least it isn't put before the S. There are some vocabulary glitches, mangled phrases, and a few dangling modifiers, and the past perfect tense isn't always used where it should be. I've seen far worse (and this is a pre-publication version I got via NetGalley, so some of them may be fixed by the time of publication; I plan to report the vocabulary ones to the publisher).
The story itself follows a princess, Elisa - usually a character type I avoid, but I let this one go because the premise sounded interesting - who is highly intelligent, magically powerful, and an excellent negotiator. The last one we're told more than shown. Her bodyguard, Lily, is a female knight who's also a priestess of the earth goddess (as is the princess), just as magically powerful and absurdly good at fighting. The princess's uncle, the crown prince, is malevolent, ill-tempered and apparently not very bright, but he is an effective political plotter; he's had Elisa's aunt, his sister, killed because she supported their other brother (Elisa's father) for the throne. He thinks that if he also has Elisa killed after a rigged trial by combat for a false accusation of treason, it will reduce support for her father, because Elisa is popular with the people; this is why I say he's not very bright, since anyone should know the effect would be the opposite.
After Lily defeats a never-before-defeated champion in the trial by combat, the two women leave the city for their own safety, heading for the neighbouring kingdom, where one of the princes has offered her marriage; she's met him previously and likes him. Their party is a mix of loyal people from their faction and people forced on them by wicked Uncle Logan, with predictable issues ensuing. There's a lot of fighting, some of it desperate against hordes of monsters, a mercenary company disguised as bandits, and internal treachery, some of it in display matches to increase Lily's and hence Elisa's reputation in her new kingdom.
I appreciated that Elisa wasn't presented as a perfect heroine; she's too focused on power and neglects or uses her "best friend" Lily while pursuing it, and she becomes more aware of it as the book progresses, not least because another character confronts her with it. I also appreciated that being attracted to someone wasn't an automatic route to romance with that person, but might lead to deciding not to pursue that option for good reasons - a realistic situation I don't see represented often enough in fiction. These elements lifted the book a little above the herd - and it's a vast herd - of other stories like this, and give me hope that it may be a series worth following. The author is inexperienced, needs to show more and tell less, and could stand to free himself a bit more from the tropes of the genre, but I found this an enjoyable book of its kind.
There are three levels of bandwagon fiction in my classification, and this is the mildest one, which I call "If you like this sort of thing, this is definitely one." (The other two, in ascending order of unoriginality, are "made from box mix" and "extruded fiction product".) Though it definitely has its flaws, it shows some promise.
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