Review: Hero Adjacent

Hero Adjacent by Alexis Veenendaal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The failure mode of "funny" fantasy is just relying on silly names, pratfalls and parodying the most low-hanging fruit in the trope orchard, while writing a story that's mostly just a series of stupid incidents, and characters who never get any depth beyond a combination of an archetype and a plot role.

I'm happy to report that this book avoids those common pitfalls. Each of the characters we follow throughout the book has at least one extra quirk on top of their archetype and plot role, and the central character has significantly more depth than that. He's a grumpy, disillusioned middle-aged wizard who has been part of the Academy's system of Chosen Ones his whole working life, functioning as a mentor and guide for good-looking teenagers with a Destiny. (These are remarkably common.) What he would love is to be able to contribute something more to the saving of the world, and this time, he finally gets to do so. Along the way, he's forced to question all of his assumptions about Chosen Ones, the Academy, magic, wizardry, goblins, warlocks, the Hero's Journey, destiny and himself.

He's believably flawed, as are his companions, and things look dire on many occasions, but they finally manage to learn to trust each other enough to pull off their world-saving feat. Side quests develop their abilities and their bonds, and encourage the wizard to re-evaluate what he'd always believed.

It's not, of course, as good as mid-career Terry Pratchett, but what is? Certainly not early-career Terry Pratchett, which it more closely resembles. I look forward to seeing this author develop further.

I had a pre-publication version from Netgalley for review, and the commas are mostly in the right places (apart from the usual excess ones between adjectives occasionally - very few authors avoid that trap). The apostrophes are occasionally not in the right places when the noun is plural, and there are some minor vocabulary glitches as well, which I'll report to the publisher in the hopes that they'll be fixed before publication. But overall, it's cleaner than average in editing, as well as being above average in other respects.

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