Witch Ember

Witch Ember Cycle #1

by John Lawson

In the days when gods walked the earth and the clay of Man was still wet, a Stone of Power was shattered. From that day forward, all humankind carried a piece. Most have just a little- just the tiniest speck of dust- but some have one of the bigger grains- or even a pebble- and they are the most powerful of sorcerers. In the paranoid, magically-barren lands of the Seven Kingdoms, the street urchin Esmeree is born to carry a stone of unprecedented size and power. As she struggles to survive the unforgiving streets of Cliffs Reach, she endeavors to master the sorcery of her stone and understand its purpose. But time is running out for her for others have discovered her skills and seek to use or destroy her. The Inquisition, the Superbus Tyrannus, the Primate of the Holy Median church. Esmeree must determine her own path, or she will die their slave.

Genres: Fantasy

Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

John Lawson’s imagination was born in the fires of the exploding Death Star, was raised in the uncharted wildernesses of Narnia, and exhibited a healthy disregard for the Prime Directive. It feasted upon giant peaches, blitzed through phantom tollbooths, and wagered heavily upon the outcome of the Westing Game. It retired skin jobs, tried to save Sarah Connor, and quested for the Holy Grail. It knew better than to press its face into a recently opened alien egg, it understood how a simple rafting trip could result in an extended dinosaur vacation, and it wept when Lowell and Huey died aboard the Valley Forge. It knows you’re not supposed to shoot a person’s gun and never give cigarettes to trees. It totally understands Wolverine’s anger issues and would like to buy him a drink at the Corova Milk Bar, where they could discuss whether or not the Snouts had it coming. It raided a dragon’s lair for treasure, doesn’t believe ROUS exist, and flipped a coin a hundred times and always came up heads. And it isn’t sure if Keyser Soze exists, but it’s afraid of him anyway.

He is the author of Sorrow Lawson , published by Drollerie Press, and two POD published books, Witch Ember and its sequel, The Raven Lawson .

He is a professional technical writer and online help developer.

MySpace:
http://www.myspace.com/witchember

Reviews

[Tami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of late, I've been getting quite a few novels (historical, science fiction, and fantasy) written with a contemporary voice. This tends to make the characters a little more edgy and tortured than traditionally written works. When it comes to fiction, I'm a little old fashioned so I prefer fantasy to sound like fantasy and science fiction to sound like science fiction. I like the feel and the pacing of the storylines. With that said, there is something very intriguing about this new style of writing. It creates a sense of realism (albeit somewhat dark and pessimistic) to the action that perhaps gets a little candy coated in other works.

Witch Ember has a very good premise. The book starts off with a legend describing how Trickster stole one of the Stones of Power. Scared that he'd get caught, he ground up the stone and fed it to the First Ancestor. Thus, everyone would get a piece of this stone. The interesting thing is that the stone wasn't ground into a perfect powder, bits of various size were left and redistributed to those who would come later.

The story continues with a young girl, Esmeree. She suffers the fate of many other children in her society. Without any semblance of love or caring, she simply serves as a tool for profit for the adults around her. But unlike other individuals, she carries something special in her chest, a witch ember, which serves as both a savior and a curse.

[Cherie · Rating 4 out of 5]

And so the story goes that in the days when gods walked the Earth, a Stone of Power was stolen by Trickster Man. To conceal his crime, he smashed the stone into tiny pieces and baked it into a bread he made for his friend, First Ancestor. Later, when it came time for the God Wejwej to create the first people, they were created from the various parts of First Ancestor. And because First Ancestor had consumed a Stone of Power, a little piece of that stone, along with it's accompanying power, was contained within each person. Most people carry just the tiniest speck or grain, while others like powerful sorcerers and wizards have one of the bigger grains, or even a pebble.

And then we have Esmeree...

We're introduced to Esmeree at around six years of age as a young homeless girl forced to work in the mills for her survival. The world in which she lives is hard and cruel, and most similar to medieval England or Tolkien's Middle Earth, or possibly some combination of the two, with Fey creatures, trolls, night stalkers, and other warrior-like creatures thrown in. The author did a terrific job of creating this fantasy world, with enough description and detail to really pull you in and make you believe you're standing right in the middle of it.

Esmeree has her own piece of stone residing within her as well, a rather large one within her chest. And though she doesn't yet fully comprehend the power lurking there, she feels it's constant tingle and knows enough to keep it secret as she learns more. Through the teachings of various people in her life, she eventually comes into her power and becomes a powerful witch herself. But unfortunately, once that power is brought to the attention of higher ups in the church and government, they will attempt to use it to their own ends.

The Medianist Church—which controls the magically-barren lands of the Seven Kingdoms and the Palpi city-states including Cliffs Reach where Esmeree lives—believes that only men have the mental capacity to carry these sacred embers, and that any female possessing them has surely gone mad or turned to a life of evil and witchcraft. They look upon witches in the same way they look upon the hostile Fée invaders from the magical lands beyond, and both are treated to torture and execution at the hands of the Inquisition, sometimes even at public displays held on festival days. This is definitely patriarchal dictatorship at its worst!

But upon reaching puberty and attaining her goal of becoming a sellaria, a paid mistress to the richer men of the city, Esmeree has unknowingly become a pawn in the Church's plans to discover others with stones. Everything Esmeree has learned so far in her life is in defiance of the Medianist ways, and headstrong as she is, she's not about to start conforming now, even if it means her life is on the line!

Witch Ember is a rich and fulfilling fantasy novel which takes place in an alternate universe. As mentioned above, the world crafted within these pages is extremely well thought out and detailed, as is Esmeree's character, who we follow for about 12 years of her life. The author manages to pull you into this world with his vivid descriptions of both time and place. And the action and violence, which at times captures the worst of human cruelty, can be quite brutal, but fortunately stops short of gore. In creating this unique world, the author also created its own slang and dialect local to the various regions, so you'll find many unfamiliar terms scattered throughout. Fortunately, these new terms appear in italics and their definitions can be found in a comprehensive glossary at the back of the book.

At 480 pages however, this book is not for the faint of heart. Taking me just over four weeks to complete, not counting the few weeks I had to put it aside so I could get a few other things out, I found myself happy to return to it, having grown quite fond of Esmeree. A word I like to use when describing books like this is "dense", referring to the fact that the reading is rich and detailed, like a thick, heavy syrup, which you tend to slowly savor, as opposed to light and fluffy, like a souffle, which goes down quicker. When reading these dense books, I definitely find myself reading slower than I would otherwise lest I miss something, and my one criticism of this book to that end is that there were many times I found the use of the new words, and having to look them up, counterproductive to its reading. Because of the richly detailed world that was painted before me, and the way I found myself pulled into it while reading, coming across a bunch of unfamiliar words would often disrupt that flow and yank me back out. I'd then look up the words in the glossary at the back and reread the relevant passages, replacing the foreign words with their English equivalents so that I could get back the same flow from it. Even if some of the words were discernible by context and didn't require looking up, I still found it disrupted my flow to have a foreign word inserted in the middle of all the English.

To this end, I thought it might help if the author introduced new words for the first time via a footnote at the bottom of the page, while still including the glossary for later look up. Though as another reviewer pointed out, the new language may not even be necessary. Sure it added a little bit to the feel of the place, each place having slightly different words for various common people and things, but I really felt that the created world was so richly drawn anyway that it wouldn't lose all that much without it. At the very least, the author might consider lessening its use in future books if I'm not the only reviewer who felt the overall delivery could be slightly enhanced without it. It would also make it a much easier read when attempting to read in bed or on the eliptical machine. ;)

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Lawson lives in Silicon Valley and, perhaps because of the surfeit of technology around him, he has written a fantasy novel set in an entirely familiar fantasy world, with just a few twists to catch the eye of those who already know their dungeons from their dragons. There's even a traditionally Tolkien-esque map at the book's start for those who always like to know where they are in a new world.

Esmeree (or Easy as she's sometimes more appropriately known) is an orphan, growing up on the dangerous and uncaring streets of Cliffs Reach in the magic-poor lands of the Seven Kingdoms. Esmeree also possess a powerful 'ember', a piece of the Stone Of Power that was shattered when Man was still young. All humans carry a remnant of the stone; most have only a speck of it but some, like Esmeree, have a much larger piece and can become powerful sorcerers. If they survive the mean streets of Cliffs Reach, that is.

Most of Witch Ember follows Esmeree's growing pains as she graduates from scavenging on the streets at age four or five to her ascension into society and sorcery in young adulthood. It's a grim journey. Lawson, very much to his credit, doesn't hold back with the horrors of an orphan's life in an essentially medieval society (Harry Potter this isn't, although oddly enough at a fundamental level the plot of the two follow similar courses). He usually knows when to be graphic (which is fairly often: bones snap, blood flows, bruises swell…) and when to be a little coyer - such as when the young Esmeree and her friends pragmatically resort to prostitution, having no other choice to avoid starvation.

Although it is Esmeree's destiny to be a powerful sorcerer (powerful enough to conjure up a sequel, me wonders?), Lawson writes cleverly enough that this isn't immediately and obviously inevitable. Esmereee spends most of Witch Ember barely surviving, scraping by with the help, often unacknowledged, of her ember and other more sinister forces higher up the social ladder in Cliffs Reach. These remain hidden from the reader, as from Esmeree, despite an omniscient and unusual third-person narrative style that functions perfectly adequately within the story structure.

The path Esmeree's life follows never seems contrived, nor is information outside her purview forced 'helpfully' upon us. At the beginning of Witch Ember the narration of her world is entirely and short-sightedly physical, as you'd expect of a child (and, perhaps, of a new reader confronted with an unfamiliar world), but it grows wider - only as she grows and learns more about the world she lives in do such adult concerns as political structures, religion and wider basic geography become at all relevant both to her and the reader. Following a child's education in the ways of the world is an excellent way to avoid blatant infodumping - I didn't notice it being done! Congratulations are due to Mr Lawson on such a well thought out and executed development of the narrative.

A couple of small bugbears, though: first, the legend behind the embers granted to people, a trickster god who steals a Stone of Power and, frightened of the theft being discovered by those less trickily inclined of his superiors, grinds it up and hides the remains in the wet clay of Man so that, as mentioned before, everyone carries a piece. It's a nice metaphorical riff on creation myths that was completely spoilt for me by being taken entirely too literally. Sorcerers are detectable because they all have a piece of rock located somewhere under their skin that is the source of all their magical power.

Secondly, imagine if you will that throughout this review I inexplicably referred to collymongers and zvixl in place of, say, characters and plot. Such is the use of language in Witch Ember, particularly the uneven use of italicised supposedly foreign words that often look and sound very similar to their English equivalents but for some strange äçcëñts. It's a device that annoys rather than conveys the otherness of some Cliffs Reach inhabitants. For example, the awful (in a very good way, they're horrible!) rraakks come across as completely alien with no italicisation and spangly accented letters at all, just some bizarre speech patterns. It's a difficult trick conveying the unfamiliar in familiar words, and simply having every other character mispronounce basic, common words or replace perfectly good English ones in an otherwise English sentence with nonsense that needs looking up in the glossary doesn't help.

Am I being overly harsh? Perhaps, but over the course of nearly 500 pages these things begin to matter, and they stand out all the more when the author is otherwise largely able to hold his own in terms of description and story.

There isn't much to dislike about Witch Ember. There is also, conversely, not much to really like either - to get your teeth sunk into and refuse to let go until the hot blood of a great story runs down your chin. I don't mean that Witch Ember is a bad book - far from it - it's just that the booklust never quite descended upon me whilst I was reading it. Esmeree's surrounding world and the terrible forces are insufficiently glimpsed or coloured to gain a toehold in our imaginations, and the ultimate point of the book, Esmeree's eventual maturation into a powerful sorceress and her triumph against some vicious odds, seems rather flat by comparison to many of the earlier scenes.

Fortunately these problems are not major ones to overcome for a next book. Lawson can write on the small, personal scale very well - if only he can learn to tackle the wider, epic stage as well.

Oh, and the illustrations are uneven and even the better ones aren't particularly helpful. I think we can manage without them...

[Jenn Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witch Ember seems to be constructed from a folktale but this dark fantasy is more than it seems. The history of the people of the Seven Kingdoms derives from folklore. Apparently a stone of great power shatters when making the world, which enables humankind to carry a piece of it. Now obviously some citizens conceal larger stones than others that allow them to perform magical functions. Unfortunately, these people are labeled as sorcerers or witches and only put them into the hands of the Inquisitors. Since most of them find their fate in death, they live their lives in secret.

The main character, Esmeree is blessed and cursed with a large stone, also called an ember. Hers is lodged in her chest and is luckily unable to be detected easily. On many occasions, her ember saves her life but it also gets her into a lot of trouble.

This character driven novel is the tale of a young woman who learns, from the age of six, to live on the streets and take care of herself. It details the horrors she endures while trying to survive as a fry at the Mill and later on in life at the hands of selfish, controlling and dangerous men. If John Lawson means to alarm you and give his readers a taste of the harsh life an abandoned youth goes through, then he has done his job.

Throughout the story of Witch Ember, Esmeree grows and develops into a moral person. Living in the slums of the Mill as basically a child slave, she learns to help only herself and ways to survive, even at the expense of others. The friends she gathers were more like people she could take advantage of. Through a long ordeal, the main character learns that sometimes in order to survive, you have to care for the well-being of others.

The world in which John Lawson propels you is similar to the rough lands of Mad Max and his adventures through Thunderdome, particularly the scene when he meets up with the child tribe. The people and land are savage, the young are left to fend for themselves and the barbaric traditions make the reader breath a sigh of relief that you live in a civilized world.

Sometimes the dialect is a little difficult to read but it separates the different cultures within the Seven Kingdoms. It does not seem like everything is molded into one and the reader definitely knows when the main character is being addressed by a different culture while on her travels.

Witch Ember is well written and graphic to the point where you can see the strange creatures and cringe at their actions. The foul smelling Rraakks are one species in particular who walk around with a decaying, corpse-like figure slung around its shoulders like a fur wrap.

The author leaves nothing out when he describes Esmeree’s life of turmoil, strife and pain while hoping to find a happy ending to her seemingly miserable life. Witch Ember is written for the adult audience and is a darker fantasy fiction than the works of Tolkien or Robert Jordan but this is a story that should not be missed. John Lawson makes you feel for this lonely character. The reader can genuinely care about Esmeree, even after the story has ended.

[Terra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Witch Ember by John Lawson is an extraordinary work of hard core Science Fiction/Fantasy. Intricately detailed, I found this novel reminds me of Dune by Frank Herbert in so many wonderful aspects.

Esmeree is a wonderful character with so many different traits that you can actually envision her in a 3-D format. She is top and foremost a witch/sorceress but doesn't realize this in the beginning of the book. Her character is developed slowly and the author is very dedicated to every detail of her.

The story starts out with Esmeree as a young child who has no parents and is left to be captured and work in the mills. Being on the bottom of the ladder so to speak really makes each little life action a hard learning experience. Esmeree knows that she is different from the other young children but doesn't exactly know why at first. It doesn't take long however for her to realize that what makes her so different has to be from her birthmark.

As time goes on in this novel, Esmeree's character develops right before our eyes over a matter of days, weeks and years to becoming a quite intelligent beautiful young woman. All of this comes at a large price that is most difficult for her to pay. She is used, abused, beaten and near death mores times than you can count. In fact, with all that Esmeree goes through it makes her a very strong character and she deals with what life throws at her with the highest of precision. Not that it doesn't knock her down a few pegs here and there but what she learns from this is hard and quite often inhuman.

The storyline is so rich that you really must read this a bit more slowly so as to not miss one single tidbit of what might be going on. It is brutal, sexually explicit and down right scary in some spots. Makes you really think about things that go bump in the night or about those stories you were told as a child to make you cautious and aware of everything and everyone around you. There is no childhood innocence here.

There are many other characters in this novel for periods of time, richly detailed and strategically used for their purposes. Some are extremely close to Esmeree and some are very alien. All are dangerous in their own ways but learning from them is worth the danger. They enrich the story tremendously.

The author gives us a world of bitter reality, harsh abusive lifestyles, greed and lust which make this some place I would hope to never see in my dreams let alone while I'm awake. With all this said I would have to give this author high kudo's for such an impressive masterpiece.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to legend, when a Stone of Power is stolen and crushed, little bits of it wound up in every human created from that point on. Normal people would have trace amounts in their system; great sorcerors had larger pieces and were, of course, only male. A young girl named Esmeree, despite having a larger than normal chunk of the stone within her, is bound for a life of servitude by those who fear her potential power. Against conventional wisdom and the standing threat of torture and death at the hands of the Inquisition, Esmeree fights to master the power of her stone. While I will admit to it taking a while for me to really get into this book, once it kicked in, I found it to be progressively easier to understand and enjoy. Especially enjoyable is Lawson's ability to load his narrative with highly graphic -- and sometimes disturbing -- images and beautifully visualized vistas.

[Stephanie Johanesen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an epic work of fiction, it is raw and beautiful and very, very dark. It is book one of a series based in a world that is fraught with war and chaos.

The author is an editor, so his book is a clean, polished package. You will not be distracted by grammar issues. This is an intenstive read, so good luck, and enjoy delving into John's incredible imagination.