A friend on my Discord was telling me about her favorite book series. “But I’ve only read the first two books,” she said, “because I had to wait for the third one to come out.” I picked up a sample of the first book, liked what I read, and kept reading, all the way through three books.
BTW, if you are the author, click away now.
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Since the summaries of the books are garbage, I refuse to use them and instead have written my own:
In a world based on Europe after the fall of Rome, a very Rome-inspired kingdom has the Talented and the non-Talented. This means that some people are born with psychic and telekinetic powers, and some aren’t. Seventh sons, in particular, have lots of powers, and the seventh son of a seventh son has multiplied powers. This is great unless the seventh child is born a daughter, because girls are only fit for breeding in this universe. The heroine, Zezilia, is seventh born and about to be introduced to society on her 15th birthday, when a talent trainer notices her insane levels of psychic power and takes her off to train her against her father’s wishes.
The highest mage in the land is the Sept Son, and his job is to train other talents and keep them from turning their powers to criminal use. Hadrian is barely old enough to drink and the seventh son of a seventh son, chosen for his crazy levels of power. He has to check Zezilia for powers and sparks fly. Bam, three years go by so now she’s eighteen and legally able to have romance, lol! Her powers are stronger than his. Since everybody in the kingdom wants Hadrian dead for increasingly hazy reasons, Zez becomes his bodyguard, except whoops, he already agreed to marry her sight unseen as the cost of training her. Cue the dramatic tension.
I have a weakness for psychic romance, and I thought it was interesting that the characters pray to the Almighty all the time. So I dove in. The psychic romance is very mild compared to, say, Firebird by Kathy Tyers. Psychic romance is very hot because of the intimacy without any physical contact. This author obviously tried to keep everything to a very mild T-rating. The characters barely kiss even after they’re married, snicker. The action is entertaining and the politics are kind of fun … at first. More on that later.
If you can’t tell, I’m building to a gripe about this trilogy. Surprise, it’s the theology.
I don’t know what denomination this author is, but the Christianity is very constrained, and by the end, I would say it’s very neutered. In book 1, the driving conflict of the plot is that the country nominally worships the Goddess, while the hero, Hadrian, worships the Almighty. And … uh … that’s about all we’re told, even though these characters pray to the Almighty literally on every page. What is the name of the Goddess? How do people worship her? Why are they threatened by Almighty worship? We’re never told. The high priest of the Goddess works very hard to undermine Hadrian and replace him … but why? By book 2, the high priest is randomly killed off and the Goddess thing is a non-issue.
We’re told that the Almighty hates sin and you have to pray to be forgiven and stuff, and the characters lug around battered copies of the holy book, the Revelation. But that’s all there is to the religion. They pray and pray and pray to this Almighty and receive in exchange a vague sense of peace. The Almighty never speaks to them, which is weird in a trilogy about psychic communication. You’d think somebody would get a message, or an emotion, or a picture, or some guidance of any kind. Book 2 has a character pick up the idiot ball and run with it twice because “apparently it’s so hard to figure out the will of the Almighty”.
By book 3, it’s apparent that the high priest of the Goddess had to die because the religion of the Goddess actually had more depth than the Almighty one. Instead, he is replaced by a political insurgent who uses abuse and sex to control people so you know he’s really the evil one. The constant praying to the Almighty slowly loses steam because the author has nothing else to say about him. He’s, uh, good or something. Even though the religion is used like a bludgeon (“You’re depressed? It’s because you don’t BELIEVE hard enough!”). There’s no joy, no reward, no relationship in this religion. The Almighty never intercedes for his followers. He’s just as distant and uncaring as the Goddess is said to be.
This really bothered me, because I’ve been writing very vivid relationships between my characters and the Divine. Since God, himself, is hard to fit into the human brain, I’ve been experimenting with metaphors, like Fith in After Atlantis, who is basically an elemental of fire and righteousness. He is present. He is terrible. He is good. And he shows up to chat whenever the heroes need him, usually with hard advice and lavish kindness combined. I was hoping that with this Christian psychic book, with intricate worldbuilding, would find a unique way to portray the believer’s relationship with God.
Turns out, I was wrong. I got to the end and was like, okay, so, what’s the deal with the Almighty? You could cut him and the Goddess out of the books and it would make literally no difference. If you made the hero black and the bad guys white, it would be the exact same conflict, and have the exact same depth. And by the end, it’s some kind of class warfare struggle anyway, because … apparently that was actually a deeper conflict to build a plot on than anything religious.
I finished the trilogy happy for the ending the characters got, but frustrated with the shallowness of the theology. I expected deep moral issues, and any kind of a portrayal of God. What I got was some kind of tract. You’re taught how to join this religion, but the religion itself is nothing I’d want to be part of. It was dead and awful. And I’m sorry to say it. As a Christian, myself, I’m deeply disappointed in this portrayal. It misrepresents everything about true faith and how God’s will actually works.
Anyway, this was a lot of space to rant about a book trilogy that I nominally enjoyed. Here is the Book a Minute of the trilogy:
Zez: I have powerful powers.
Hadrian: I am cruelly overworked.
Zez: Let’s kiss.
SOMEONE TRIES TO KILL HADRIAN
Hadrian: Sorry about that. Let’s kiss.
SOMEONE TRIES TO KILL HADRIAN
Zez: That sucked. Let’s kiss.
SOMEONE TRIES TO KILL HADRIAN
REPEAT 1000X MORE
THE END
K. M. Carroll, Author 