Charlene Austin
John Crispin-Ripley
Vicki Delany
Janet Miller
Kate Saundby
Ilene Sirocca
Carrol Wolverton
Elves? Pre-history? Epic? Ever since Tolkien, these have been stock formula fantasy fare. Right?
With all this in mind, I decided to load The Start of Magic on my Rocket and take it to bed with me in the hopes it would help me sleep.
Sleep, nothing. I hate reading on my P.C, especially late at night, but before transferring The Start of Magic to Rocket Librarian, I decided to take a quick look to see what I was getting into. That was a major mistake. Instantly hooked by Bob Rich's poetic opening sentences, the next thing I knew it was three a.m. The only creature to get the benefits of my electric blanket that night was the cat. Worse yet, I had to be up at seven.
Like a rabbit caught by oncoming headlights, I was totally mesmerized by this glorious tale of three incompatible peoples and their conflict's tragic outcome. Blinking back to reality from The Start of Magic's vivid world, I was cramped, stiff and cold, and sorry it was only a story.
While there will be inevitable comparisons drawn between The Start of Magic and Jean Auel's Clan of the Cave Bear, in this reviewer's opinion, there's no contest. Between its story's elegant grace and the deceptive simplicity of Bob Rich's lyrical writing, The Start of Magic wins hands down, and I look forward to more such prehistoric epics from this masterful Australian talespinner.
Kate and I did a 'review swap: I read and hugely enjoyed her book, A circle of Arcs, and she did the same for me, choosing The Start of Magic from among my titles. This is what she says about herself:
The author of the eleven title Nublis SF/Fantasy Series and a historical time travel, A Circle of Arcs, Kate Saundby is a 2001 Eppie finalist in two categories. Before turning to fiction in 1996, she wrote op ed pieces for various newspapers for 25 years and is a self-described political scold. Samples of her work may be found at http://www.realmofnublis.com.
Title: The Start of Magic
Author: Dr. Bob Rich
Genre: Mythological Fiction
Heather, a girl living in the forests of Northern Siberia seven hundred years before Christ, belongs to a race of tiny people called the Ehvelen. These hunter-gatherers dwell in harmony, following the tenets of "the Mother" and sharing equally in life's duties and pleasures. But one terrible day Heather and several of her companions are attacked by a group of Doshi, warlike nomads who have set up camp on the plain across the river. The Doshi kill Heather's male friends and take her and another young woman prisoner. The other girl escapes, but Heather becomes a slave and the unwilling lover of Aram, a Doshi leader. Although she longs to return to the Ehvelen, Heather grows to love Aram, and she becomes friendly with some of the Doshi and their slaves.
Meanwhile, the Doshi return to the forest to destroy the Ehvelen, but they have underestimated the "midgets", who use their phenomenal hunting skills with deadly effectiveness. The Doshi start to believe that the Ehvelen possess magical powers, but they regroup and plan a massive assault. Heather is desperate to escape and warn her people. How can she accomplish this, especially after she becomes pregnant?
We know from other stories in the Ehvelen series that Heather escapes and that she becomes a great war leader, but that doesn't keep us from enjoying The Start of Magic, which the author "translated" from part of a huge mass of material written down by a descendant of the Ehvelen in 892 A.D. More episodes will be published later. This is fortunate, since The Start of Magic ends with a cliffhanger as the Ehvelen and Doshi forces prepare for battle.
In this novel, we learn a great deal about the Doshi. They are fierce, brave, and ruthless, and they treat women as possessions. Some of them, however, are also kind and loving, within their limitations. Heather responds to their humanity and shares her healing and musical gifts with them. In the end, she must overcome her own tender-heartedness and the despair brought on by slavery. Indomitable, courageous, and intelligent, Heather is an amazing, admirable woman, a wonderful representative of the Ehvelen.
The story is filled with authentic detail, and some of the characters are quite intriguing, especially a wily trader named Moustaf from the Areg Empire. A consummate wheeler-dealer, he has his own plans for Heather and her people. Other characters are almost interchangeable, as are several skirmishes between the Doshi and Ehvelen, which are often described as they happen and then again as the participants recount them. This slows the pace a little, but is appropriate in a story rooted in oral tradition.
Dr. Rich provides helpful notes at the end of the book, as well as tantalizing excerpts from tales yet to come. The best thing about The Start of Magic, and about the Ehvelen series in general, is that the more we read, the more we want to know.
Ilene Sirocca is a freelance reviewer. meadlark@sgi.net. She has reviewed every one of my e-books so far, and I have learned lots about the art of reviewing from her.
Start of Magic is a perfect title for a book that is magical -- not in the way of wizards and spells and mages, but the magic of people faced with overwhelming odds and not only winning, but keeping their values strong.
Heather is a young woman of the Ehvelen, a nation of tiny people living deep in the woods of Central Europe around 700 BC. Her people didn't know that one human could be the enemy of another. So when strangers arrive in their woods they step forward to offer greetings. Heather is taken prisoner and her friends killed by the warlike Doshi.
Not only is Heather now faced with a life of slavery, both physical and sexual, a value previously incomprehensible to her but she is forced to confront the reality of a world her people can't imagine exists: a world in which one human being can own another, kill or mutilate another. As Heather struggles to keep her spirit alive under the crushing weight of slavery, she realizes that the Doshi are a threat to much more than she, herself. That they intend to return to her lands and enslave all her people. Only Heather has the knowledge to save them.
Dr. Bob Rich has created a rich world. He writes beautifuly about the life of the tribes, the simple day to day practices of travelling, healing, giving birth, cooking, their tents and their mud huts. He manages to effectively interweave such commonplace things of all our lives with a great and ancient human dilemma: when a peace loving people unwittingly come into contact with warlike nations, can they survive? Or is their only choice to become equally vicious, or to die?
Both the battle scenes and the life of the peoples as they gather around the fire are effectively and realistically drawn.
Dr. Rich clearly has a love of the Ehvelen equal to that of Tolkien for his Hobbits. The book provides us with an insight into the customs, history and language of the Ehvelen. The Start of Magic is the first part of a comprehensive series on the history of the Ehvelen. I am looking forward to reading the rest.
Vicki Delany's contemporary thriller Whiteout is an EPPIE 2001 winner. Therefore, her good opinion means a lot to me. Her web site is at http://www3.sympatico.ca/vdelany.
Torn from her idyllic existence, Heather is enslaved by the Doshi, a culture in which a man isn't a man until he's killed an enemy and a woman isn't a person... ever. Heather's people, the Ehvelen, live in harmony with nature and the day Heather is taken is "the day when the Mother started to forge us into Her sword against slavery, cruelty, exploitation" according to the Ehvelen storyteller reciting Heather's story.
The Start of Magic is not sword-and-sorcery fantasy. By most standards, it's not fantasy at all but rather, speculative history. The "magic" in the title is implied, not overt. There are no towering wizards spouting lightning from their fingers, no dragons and no mind-control more powerful than the sort perpetrated by modern advertising--then again, that's pretty powerful and destructive in its own right. No one in this book wears designer clothing and for lack of commercial tie-in potential, it's doubtful The Start of Magic will ever become a big budget movie.
Which is a pity, as this is a beautifully written novel, elegant and flowing, one that should be on everyone's "must read" or "must reread" list. Heather is a compelling character, fully developed with a realistic range of strengths and weaknesses, a person who will linger in most readers' minds long after the book is finished. That said, it also must be noted she is unique among the Ehvelen in her complexity. In general, the bad guys in The Start of Magic are bad but do have some human qualities--they treat their women and other pets well. Some even seem fond of Heather as something other than a potential bed-mate, although most ache for her and the other Ehvelen women that way. The good gals (and guys), however, are good--overly so. One longs for an Ehvelen Iago or Falstaff, or an Ehvelen female who doesn't inspire instant lust in Doshi males.
But that's a minor caveat. Bob Rich crafts first-rate fiction and fully admits he has an agenda to promote sustainable development and to decry consumer "culture." Considering the quality of his writing, that is probably the reason he remains "only" an e-book author. The Start of Magic is undoubtedly a better book than almost anything in print, or that has been in print in the past ten years.
The Start of Magic is available from Anina's Book Company
J. Crispin-Ripley is a Canadian author who writes about fame, celebrity and other illusions. He considers taking oneself too seriously the ultimate crime against humanity and thinks if people laughed more at the pretensions of those who call themselves "leaders", the world would be a far better place. In his opinion, Shakespeare is the only writer worth stealing from, which is why everyone does exactly that, whether they know it or not.
Crispin-Ripley's first novel, "The Wrong Places", a comedy of manners masquerading as a mystery, was published by Double Dragon Ebooks in January of 2002. He has also written "The Image of Christian", the first volume of a polemic fantasy, and "Adornments of Glory", a quasi-epic fantasy. Sample chapters of these novels (and eventually, others), some short fiction, and links to his publisher can be found at his home page, Efigments.
The Start Of Magic (part 1) purports to be an excerpt from an Ehvelen (think "elven") account written by one of these little people, a man named Porcupine. Porcupine was a chronicler of his people's history, which he learned orally as a child. The story in this excerpt centers on Heather, known later as "the Mother." When she was fifteen and on her adult-proving hunt, a scouting party of men of the Doshi, a nomadic tribe, attacked Heather. She was captured along with another small woman, Oak, while the three young men with them were killed. Oak managed to kill her captor and escape, but Heather was enslaved for a year, forced to be one of the Doshi leader's women, and ultimately having his child.
The Ehvelen people were small, extremely strong, agile, and fleet of foot. They were also at one with nature, a peaceful people all around. In comparison, the Doshi were nomadic plains-dwellers, male-centric, all other people being slaves or women, little better than slaves. Slave men were always castrated, women always given to a Doshi man to ensure the creation of more Doshi. Heather settles into an uneasy relationship with her master and the other people of the Doshi, her one ambition to escape and return home to her people, giving them warning about the giants who hungered for their destruction.
This is a book rich and detailed in content and style. The main characters were well established. The life of the Doshi and by comparison, the Ehvelen's way of life, was described in considerable detail. Clearly a lot of work went into the writing of this book and its companion books, to create the societies these people lived in. Sometimes the story is not for the faint of heart; there are beatings and other incidents of cruelty that were hard to read, but satisfied the purpose of showing us how calloused Heather's captors were and why she would go to such lengths to keep them away from her own people.
In spite of the main characters being identified as elf-like people, this book is marketed as a historical novel. It is not a romance story although there is a very nice little romance with a Doshi man who is more sympathetic than the others and his new woman. The only magic Heather's people have are the natural ones of being smaller, faster, and stronger than their opponents. The book is a good example of taking something what we usually see as fantasy and giving it a naturalistic explanation. There are at least two other books in this series, one centering on Horse, Heather's son. All are or will be available from Zumaya Publications.
I don't know who Janet Miller is, and have no way of tracking her down. She posted this review at Booksurge.
This review appeared at Fiction Forum. The book was awarded four stars.
Dr. Bob Rich's, "The Start of Magic," begins an exciting mythic tale of the Ehvelen peoples from long ago. Their name suggests elves or fairies, and they have beautiful faces, eyes, and bodies that are quite small, averaging about three feet tall. The image is enhanced by their very physical behaviors of leaping among tree tops and singing like birds to secretly communicate. Enemies see their ways as magical and envy them. They are not warlike at all and seek union and reverence for all life.
Grasshopper of Quicksands records their existence and struggle for survival. Maybe imaginary or maybe not, the Ehvelen inhabit a heavily wooded environment and worship the Mother as all-powerful. Women are revered as the source of all life and serve as strong leaders and equal partners in the defense and survival of their world. Sex is a gift from the Mother. Women, as well as men, are trained as hunters and are equals in defending the group. Their society is controlled as to numbers. In this manner they survive as a group in the same-forested lands for many generations.
Trouble looms and Heather of Quiet Glen is captured by the enemy Doshi and held captive. Although pregnant from being raped by her Doshi master, Heather links with two other enslaved women and plans an escape. She is successful and is able to warn her people to prepare for war. Although not fully told, we are led to believe that the Ehvelen are able to repel the Doshi this time and continue their lives at least for now.
For the lover of mythic literature this book provides the first in a series of tales of a mythic people. This book is recommended for readers who like to question and explore possibilities from our past questions that transcend into the present. The Ehvelen exist in a wonderful society too good to survive. That fact leaves Dr. Bob Rich and us feeling that their potential destruction affects us all, even today. He has an important message: if we destroy our environment, we destroy our future.
Carrol Wolverton is the author of SERIOUS SURVIVAL: SKILLS FOR SINGLE PARENTS based on her ten years as a single parent counselor in two states. The book is more than a good self-help book, it's a great support group manual and provides very relevant topics for group discussion. Available on booklocker.com ($14.95) and amazon.com, it may also be purchased in ebook format and downloaded ($7.95). Carrol is vice president of North Florida Writers and will be actively involved in judging the novel competition for the spring writer's conference. Persons interested in entering may obtain more information at www.fccj.org/wf (First Coast Writer's Festival).
Grasshopper, the storyteller, has written the stories of his people. THE START OF MAGIC is the first of the stories of the Ehvelen.
A young group of Ehvelen hunters are unafraid when they meet the giants in their forest. After all, the concept of anyone harming another person is totally unknown; it would never occur to them. They are a peaceful people, who honor the mother within, and respect all life and learning. They greet the Doshi invaders with welcome and friendship. The boys are quickly slaughtered with arrows from the warrior's bows, and the girls, Oak and Heather, taken as slaves. Oak manages to kill her owner and escape, but Heather is trapped, a slave of the Doshi: a woman used by her master for pleasure, scorned for her status as slave.
The Doshi return to the forest of the Ehvelen, for one has seen gold. They are secure in their strength as warriors. But, again and again, the raiding Doshi are driven back across the river. The Ehvelen are skilled hunters, and have learned the art of camouflage from the animals they stalk. They are a very small people, but strong and agile, able to jump from great heights and run long distances at great speed. The Doshi warriors fall, their skulls crushed by stones. They die, felled by spears wielded with deadly accuracy and tremendous strength by an enemy they cannot catch, and rarely see.
The Doshi begin to believe the "midgets" have magic powers. Despite this belief, when the Ehvelen kill Harila's son, Djing, he vows vengeance. The word goes out to all the Sabads to gather and turn all their warrior's strength against the forest people.
Heather will learn, from the Areg trader, Moustaf, from the other Doshi slave women, the language and the ways of these savage people, their strengths and their weaknesses. For she must escape, warn her people, and prepare them for war.
Dr. Bob Rich has created a world to match his name. THE START OF MAGIC is a story rich in its ability to pull you into the fantasy of a long ago time of myth and legend. Rich in strong, believable characters that tug at the heartstrings or shock with their savagery. A lesson in the absurdity of prejudice, slavery, and man's innate cruelty to man. THE START OF MAGIC is a stirring and entertaining read, while showing how violence begets violence and vengeance erodes values.
The companion volume "THE MOTHER'S SWORD, and the trilogy TRAVELS OF THE FIRST HORSE, may be read in any order.
Charlene Austin was raised in Zion National Park, and now resides in Las Vegas, Nevada with five of her grandchildren. A medical office manager, Char has been writing since she was eleven. She has published several poems and short stories and completed a paranormal mystery novel, Dream Pictures.
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