Name: First Voyage (The Sea Lord Chronicles #1)
Rating: 4.13 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780615733340

312 reviews34 followers

August 26, 2014

Let me begin by saying this is not a bad book. Not at all. I do, in fact, want to read more from this series! (How could I not? I mean, Napoléon Bonaparte is a powerful Fire Wizard! How friggin' cool!) At times I even considered this novel deserving of the highest of ratings. But then it did something that ticked me off and I began noticing all the little things that had been nagging at the back of my mind that I had managed to ignore only because the narrative had been so much fun and entertaining until then.

Before anything else one should keep in mind this book is aimed primarily at young readers, early to mid-teens (going by the writing), so I am not going to complain about the simple language too much: the text employs mostly main-clauses with few conjunctions, and simple adjectives. I wouldn't call it a reduced vocabulary though, since the book is not shy about introducing nautical terminology. Only at the beginning did I feel like the text was talking down to its reader when explaining a term. Fortunately, later in the book the terminology gets introduced in much more natural sounding fashion.

As an adult reader I enjoyed the novel mostly for three reasons:

First of all, I was drawn to this book by the Fantasy elements. I have not been able to find many Age of Sail novels with a fantastic twist to them, but it is a genre cross-over that I genuinely want to read more of (which is the main reason why I will pick up a sequel to this book, even if I didn't love this first volume). Temeraire is the only really popular series of books of this type that comes to mind. And while dragons are my absolute favourite magical creatures, the series goes out of its way to ground its fantastical alterations in reality by any means possible and avoids any more magical and supernatural aspects it could have included. The Sea Lord Chronicles here, however, goes all out with the magic! The wizards in this world, called Elementals, after the Aristotelean elements, control either Wind, Earth, Fire or Water and the only explanation we get is a mythological one, which is that the elementals are descended from the Roman Gods (which leads to head-scratching moments when the God of the Sea is referred to as "Neptune", but the underworld is referred to as "Hades", instead of "Poseidon" or "Orkus" respectively. Also, despite all this, characters believe in the Christian God).

Furthermore the book features gryphon riders as aerial support for the armies and navies of the time, and they are awesome! Why gryphons? Why not! We're not given much explanation how these creatures work, or whether they're the only fantastical beasts in this alternate reality, but they fit the setting extremely well. Plus, combining ships with fantastical aerial support is, in my eyes, always a good idea! Similary to the aerial corps in Temeraire the gryphon riders have the reputation of hotheads, of being slightly weird, and doing things differently. And just like the aerial corps of Temeraire they employ the occasional woman (gryphons needing light riders to be effective flyers is a good enough reason to work in this setting).

Secondly, First Voyage reminded me pleasantly of other books I had read and liked. Of course, mainly young-adult stuff that I read when I was younger, but the book also owes, or, more neutrally, shares a lot of scenes with the Age of Sail Classics. However this could turn into a deal-breaker for some readers, since it means a lot of key scenes are not that original:

I thought I recognised a couple of character constellations or scenes from Hornblower’s midshipman days and from Harry Potter. For example, our first glimpse of Fowley, the older, failing ensign, was very similar to the way Simpson is introduced in Mr Midshipman Hornblower. It is even more evident if you’ve watched the TV adaptation. There’s another bit similar to the interrogation scene in Hornblower and the way Alexander comes aboard Resolution the first time, sea-sick, and is greeted by Roger was rather reminiscent of the welcome poor Horry receives on the TV show. The way Alexander stood up to Fowley also evokes strong parallels to Harry Potter standing up to Draco Malfoy during their first Quidditch lesson. Whether these scenes and other scenes like it were included deliberately or simply found its way into the book because they are very effective tropes and archetypes that come natural to this kind of story I do not know; they didn’t decrease my enjoyment of the novel, but you will notice the similarities, if you’ve read these or similar books.

Thirdly, the young main characters (Alexander and Toby) are cute and quickly grow on you. However, as with the last point, this can be both a good and a bad thing, especially with Alexander. He simply reads too cute, too innocent and young to be a protagonist you want to read about in a military setting. He reads more like a modern thirteen year old boy, than a Georgian teen, which is a huge difference. I am convinced this makes it easier for young readers to identify with Alexander and his friends, but it also made reading much more uncomfortable for me, considering the romanticisation of war, patriotism and sacrifice that is going on in this book. I would have had less trouble with it if the book had dealt with these topics in a more mature way, or at least if the protagonist had been a better mental fit for the period the novel takes place in.

Let's take the bit in the end, in which it is clear that Resolution's crew are facing a vastly superior force. Alexander feels suddenly inspired by the Captain's speech about how they will give their lives for England that he is no longer afraid to die. That was one of the bits that severely pissed me off. Alexander is still pretty much a landlubber at this point. He has only been in the navy for a couple of weeks, and before this hardly ever left the family estate. It would have been much more believable had he taken strength from realising he had to defend the one home (the ship) he had made real friends in, instead of some vague notion of patriotism that he had had no understanding of only a couple of pages ago. With the way it is written, however, the only way I can describe this particular piece of characterisation is icky. If this were a novel intended for adults I would simply roll my eyes and move on with the text, but in fiction intended for a younger audience stuff like this really irks me.

Fear, especially fear of death is only human and should be addressed. Showing the hero to be afraid is the cool, modern thing to do! I hope any future installments of the series respect their young audience enough to deal with topics like facing death in a more critical, less romanticised way. In a similar fashion the way Alexander is all excited about the power of a ship's cannon the first time he sees one (thankfully many chapters before his first battle) is eerie, but never reflected upon later. Furthermore, it is mentioned that characters (both mute extras and named main characters) die, but it is never given any real weight. This is another thing that infuriated me about the last chapter: The mutilation of one of the boys falls emotionally flat! This might simply be the simple, slightly whimsical and therefore detached writing style coming back to bite the text in its rear. But by that point, there should have been so many key moments between Alexander and the dying boy to call upon to give this scene more weight, yet I never felt it. The chance is never seized. Instead I found the execution of the scene pretty flat and cheap.

Death feels cheap in this novel! Probably because I felt like the book never really deals with what it means for the boys to serve on a ship of war and the danger they're in. And it's partly the fault of the whimsical Harry Potter atmosphere the book evoked by pretty much including tropes and archetypes so well known from boarding school fiction. The more serious scenes that invariably remind you of the true nature of the setting and the period portrayed (like Toby threatening to shoot Fowley) seem curioulsy out of place in the adventures at boarding school flair the text invokes most of the time.

So, yeah, the ending was what annoyed me the most. I had a lot of fun until then. And it is not even the actual ending that annoyed me, just the way the book deals with pretty hefty topics, such as mentioned above, which result in all the ways this ending falls a bit flat for me.

The actual plot does end on a semi-cliffhanger, but that didn't bother me too much, since we did get a big bang that wrapped up the final episode of the novel nicely and read like a logical finisher to the build-up of the mystery around Alexander's powers. So, despite being open ended, the book doesn't exactly leave you hanging, which I like. Instad it opens up a natural next stage in the series' story. So, really, this is the best kind of cliffhanger, or rather sequel hook, you could have.

As for the actual plot, it didn't wow me, but I really liked it. It is nothing fantastically original, but perfectly serviceable and in this case pulled off well enough to be extremely fun and engaging to follow, even if you've read similar tales before: A boy is thrust into a strange, new world (the navy), by his somewhat less than loving relatives (his grumpy, stickly, greedy uncle, who may or may not have usurped the family fortune). As the boy accustoms to his new environment, he is beset by bullies (Fowley), but by standing up to them manages to gain loyal friends (Roger and Toby). And by exceeding expectations he even manages to gain the respect and tutelage of the benevolent figures of authority (the captain). It's a classic coming of age story, but the unique setting and the sympathetic main character make it an old tale retold in a new coat, well worth a read.

The only bit I truly could have done without was the soothsaying. It didn't create tension so much as killing it. Desdemona's fate would have been much more significant if we hadn't been expecting it. I could also have done without the hint that there was a romance in store for Amelia. It is made pretty explicit that there is something going on between Bellingham and her from the beginning. Also the warning to Alexander that he must be careful not to use his powers for evil was so vague that it added nothing to our understanding of him or his powers, so that the whole scrying session might have been left out entire. As a piece of world-building it is nice to know that there are forms of magic available to people who are not elementals, but the scene might as well have revealed something that would without have been less obvious. The only shocking information the scrying revealed was the one thing that had to come true so we would know the soothsayer was not a fraud. Unfortunately any other revelations now left to be fulfilled from the scene were either obvious from the start, or too vague to create any sort of tension.

So, as not to end on a negative note: This series has a lot of potential and I would really love to see it do well, because I want more crossovers between Fantasy and Age of Sail fiction. But I do think books for young readers are well able to deal more critical with moral issues without having to fear coming off as being too preachy or too boring, and this series should definitely attempt to do so.

age-of-sail fantasy historical-fantasy

The Sea Lord Chronicles #1

First Voyage

David Healey

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