The Amber Legacy

Dreaming in Amber #1

by Tony Shillitoe

You are pursued by the shadows of death, girl, the weight you will carry is more than any mortal should bear. But bear it you must.

Meg Farmer doesn't believe in magic and she certainly doesn't believe that she has inherited the Blessing, despite her mother's best hopes and prayers. But when an ancient sliver of amber reveals the truth, Meg's life is changed forever. She is called to the city to be trained as a Seer - against the wishes of those who think a woman should be kept from such knowledge.

This path takes her into unknown territory, especially when she unwittingly opens a portal into the grey dust of Sereya, the world of the ancient Andrakian Dragonlords. And there finds a trapped soul...

Genres: Fantasy

557 pages, Paperback

First published January 25, 2006

About the author

Tony Shillitoe is an Australian-based author of fantasy, speculative, teenage and crime detective fiction. His first fantasy series, the Andrakis trilogy, was published by Pan Macmillan in 1992-3. HarperCollins have subsequently published two more fantasy series - the Ashuak Chronicles and Amber Legacy. The Last Wizard (1995) was shortlisted for the inaugural Aurealis Awards, as was Blood in 2002. Caught in the Headlights was listed as a notable read for older readers by the Childrens Book Council in 2003. Most recently, In My Father's Shadow, a young adult novel, was published through Amazon Kindle (2015).

Reviews

[Mel]

DNF'd at 250

Now... I really wanted to like this book. It had such an interesting and unique setting. High fantasy, but make it Australian. The first page had me so excited with descriptions of the Mallee bushland, corellas and kangaroos. It's a setting I have never seen before in fantasy and the blurb had me intrigued. And I'll be honest, the plot isn't why I stopped reading. In fact, at 250 pages, I don't actually know what the plot is beyond "Meg can do magic and according to blurb ends up in a city to train it and there's probably politicing". If it hadn't been for my one massive gripe I probably would have finished and overall enjoyed this book even with it being a bit cliche and clunkily written.

So this book (as far as I got) followed 16-year-old Meg Farmer as she falls in love with a stranger and then goes on a journey to try and save his life after prophetic dreams that he would die at war. And this is actually where my personal gripe begins.

Super cringy handling of romance and sex, and over-sexualisation of main character. Non-spoiler summary: Every. Single. Man. thinks Meg is the hottest piece of ass they have ever seen and wants to have sex with her. She falls in love with the stranger in like 3 days and they have sex. There is attempted rape. A fake sex scene to escape a cell. Grief sex at a really weird time (which was honestly my last straw). And again, every single man that she meets after leaving her sleepy little town of Summerbrook makes a comment about how pretty she is and how they'd like to have sex with her and how she can pay for stuff with 'favours'. It became grating very quickly and even if the plot was amazing, I don't think I could drag myself through that if the rest of the book continues on these lines.

I don't balk at sex in books, or at terrible things happening to characters. If done right it adds nuance, character growth and tragedy. This books did not handle it well and just kept hammering it home that all the men were predators and were salivating after Meg and that they all were thinking with their dicks.

It also felt like Meg's agency was being taken away, not once in all her interactions did I believe that that was what she wanted.

Spoiler rant about the 'romance':

So Meg is 16, at the beginning of the book she kinda has a crush on a local boy, Button, but he wasn't in it long enough to be of any consequence beyond having an awkward crush. Anyway, after an incident with her horse leaves her unconscious, a scout (named Treasure) claiming to be part of the Queen's army 'saves' her - he gives her a bit of water and within 5 minutes of him finding her the townsfolk find her and he slinks off because no one is supposed to know he's there not even any of the soldiers in the army that's currently in town. Honestly, that should have been a massive red flag to Meg.

Anyway, they meet again a couple times after that with her going out into the bush to thank him and him asking for food. Cos apparently a super competent scout can't catch his own or ask his supervisor for more rations. But whatever. At their second meeting he tries to kiss her on the cheek. She rebuffs and he goes on to apologise for being 'so forward' and he didn't mean to offend. I think this was supposed to be perceived as chivalry? But it's severely undermined when like a page later Treasure tries again and Meg just lets it happen. This also happens a second time with Treasure kissing her on the lips. Then on the night he leaves to follow the army doing scout stuff he rocks up at her house and is all like "I had to see you one last time" despite they fact they have maybe spent 8 hours together in total. And then they have sex. But the thing that makes me cringe at it is that a couple pages later there's the line "she gave herself to him because he wanted it". Like wtf. If it was just her being a horny teen I would have rolled my eyes and moved on. But this was just ew.

Cue "I'm in love". Meg has prophetic dream and follows the army to try and save Treasure from being killed by the Knight in blue armour.

Cue cringey travel montage of all men being creepy and wanting to jump her bones.

Turns out Treasure is working for the rebels and is the knight in blue. Meg kills him thinking she's saving him and understandably is horrified and grief stricken given she's supposedly in love with him. And with Treasure dead life isn't worth living anymore. No, for real, she says that 'nothing matters anymore' despite a page before meeting Treasure thinking she may be in love with Button. And here I thought we might have turning point that had me interested again with the unexpected twist of her having killed the man she loves.

But fear not! One of the soldiers in the army, Blade, who figured out that she was a woman in disguise but is a Good Guy TM and doesn't tell anyone is there to pick up the pieces. He knows that she was looking for her love, and when he catches her sobbing the night of Treasure's death can probably put it together that the person she's looking for is dead. He hugs her to comfort her... and then brings her back to his tent where he starts feeling her up. At first it seems like enthusiastic consent from Meg, which I thought was in bad taste, but whatever, you do you boo.

But the straw that broke the camels back for me, is that for the second time, she only goes through with it because that's what the guy wants. It is explicitly written that when Blade kisses her she recoils and second-guesses her desire but that Blade talks her into having sex.


So between Meg's male-gaze sexual awakening and every man being a horndog, this book lost me before I ever even really got to learn what it was about. Which is a real shame.

[Neph · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book opens in a distinctly Australian bush setting with teenaged Meg Farmer fighting against the growing evidence that she may be Blessed with the ability to dream parts of the future and thus cast spells. Having this ability (activated by a sliver of Amber) plunges Meg into the forefront of political machinations and war. After the inevitable move to the city, a pivotal role in complex political machinations and huge personal losses, Meg returns home to find happiness.

I'd looked at this book more than once on a bookstore shelf, yet never managed to actually buy it. I eventually borrowed it from a friend. It's a 'coming of age' story, and apparently that means the teenaged girl needs to have lots of sex. There's sex with a handsome stranger with a mysterious purpose, sex with a married man, feigned sex to escape, and *spoiler alert* sex with the socially sanctioned 'man I will marry and raise a family with'.

There are some attempts at tying Meg's emerging/awakening sexual self with some basic feminist awareness (there are complaints about gendered chore divisions early on and the word 'misogynistic' even made it into print). For instance, Meg's arrival partially catalyses a change in the male-only Seers order, but not without a price (**spoiler alert** why is it always the hair?? I don't understand why shaving women's heads is so often used as a way of shaming women in SF books). In other passages, the Queen holds forth on how their gender lets them be underestimated. But certain plot points, for example **spoiler alert** the fact that the children borne out of wedlock (Treasure and Jon) both meet an untimely death undermine the attempts at more positive depictions of female sexuality.

I really enjoyed seeing the Australian bush in a fantasy setting, I think the concepts of the 'familiar' and the use of the legacy (amber) were well done. The eventual resolution felt like a cop out, although I understand the later books pick up where this one ended, and follow Meg until late in her life.

It's unfair, but so many SF books revolve around the young man coming of age that when the roles are inverted and we have a female protagonist, I do have higher standards. There invariably seems to be a much greater focus on sexuality, but less on sexual agency. For example, while young men are clumsy with desire (Black Prism's Kip, Edding's Garion), young women appear to enjoy their new status as 'objects of desire' or desirability. It's bullshit, and something that weakens the genre. This book is well intentioned, but in many ways this only serves to highlight the limitations of the genre more broadly. Apart from the gender politics and the Australian setting, this book overall is a bit, well, meh. It's not egregious, nor is it exceptional. After reading it I was mildly curious as to the rest of the series, but there are so many more interesting books ahead in my 'to be read' queue that I won't be hurrying.

[(bookworms ate my brain) Beffy · Rating 2 out of 5]

So one of the main reasons I bought this book was because it's by an Australian author and I thought it would be different to the fantasy stories I've read in the past.
But I was wrong.
The main character Meg (and there are a lot of tangential characters that could have been cut because they seemed unnecessary) was so annoying. At sixteen years of age she has become the "man" of the house who has to look after her family because she thinks her mother and younger brothers are so helpless without her. She wears the trousers and insists that she won't put on a dress. She stomps around being a bossy pain in the arse but that's all fine because she's so pretty with her red hair that people like her anyway . . .
Every time Meg has a conversation with her mother it ends up with Meg scoffing at the nonsense that comes out of the silly old bag but then she complains that no one ever tells her anything? Well why would they? Meg already knows everything and is the source of all wisdom and knowledge - typical stupid adolescent behaviour that has been done to death.
The story was all over the place, there was too much foreshadowing and obscure dreams wandering off into suddenly introduced characters that vanished even quicker for me to be able to develop any interest in Meg and what happened to her.
Meg became annoying and then irritating to the point that it was a relief when the story followed other characters however briefly. Too bad I already bought the next book in the series. I hope it's better than this one.

[Skye · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite series.

[Allison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dnf, there are entirely too many almost rape scenes for my liking, and the mc, a 15 yo girl, is constantly sexualized by every man she meets in a way that's more fetishistic than realistic

[Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first in the Dreaming in Amber series, The Amber Legacy by Tony Shillitoe is a solid fantasy read. Meg, a young woman working her family's farm, falls for a stranger as war looms. As the peaceful life of her village is changed by civil war and the conscription of young men, Meg leaves her home to follow her lover into battle. With a confusing gift for prophetic dreams and secrets in her family's past, Meg is thrust into political and religious conflicts that change her life forever.

I particularly enjoyed the author's choice to write high fantasy set in a world based on the Australian landscape, rather than the stereotypical pseudo Medieval Europe. With eucalypts, dingos, kangaroos and the harsh Australian climate, the setting for the novel is unique to fantasy. It was wonderful to experience a novel set in a landscape that reflects my own Australian life and that of the author.

Having read some other reviews of this novel, I am surprised to see them mention that Meg has a lot of sexual encounters. I can only point to two- Meg and Treasure and a single encounter with another soldier following a battle. The soldier was married but now widowed, his wife having died. In the final chapter, it is implied that Meg is sexually active with the man she is marrying. Other reviews had me wondering if there were multiple, prolonged sex scenes and there aren't. It is mentioned but the scenes are minimal and quite tame.

I look forward to reading more of the Dreaming in Amber series.

[Eleanor · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is by far the worst book I have ever read. I finished it for one reason: I bought it with a gift voucher I'd gotten for my birthday.

I hate books where the reader is constantly bombarded with the knowledge that the main character is incredibly good looking, and this book is full of it! Nevertheless, I could've put that aside if the character wasn't having so much sex with people! It just felt unrealistic - she hopped into bed with this guy she barely knew but cared deeply about, then on her quest has sex with another guy who is married (they do this to cope with the challenge of war or something??). And then, when she's not having sex people are trying to have sex with her, and there's one scene where two characters have to pretend their having sex so they can escape or distract the guard or something - COME ON

I was so distracted by this that I can barely remember what else happened in the book. Maybe there wasn't heaps of sex, whatever, but it was a hell of a lot more than any other book I've read. I don't mind sex in books, it can be hot, intense and passionate, but in this case it was irrelevant (after the first time) plot-wise, and made me dislike the character because she slept with a married man.

And then - her baby dies! And she seemed to recover so quickly. This felt like plain ol' "get rid of the baby - we don't need it in the story anymore". And it died in such a brutal way. No forgiveness there. You don't mess with babies man.

Okay, rant over.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

“You are pursued by the shadows of death, girl. The weight you will carry is more than any mortal should bear. But bear it you shall.”

In the remote village of Summerbrook, far in the north- eastern corner of the kingdom of Western Shess - a land with a distinctly Australian feel to its native flora and fauna - we are introduced to Meg Farmer, a young girl who doesn’t believe in magic, but is the inheritor of a legacy that is older than she can comprehend. Meg has always been plagued by vague dreams, but when an ancient sliver of Amber awakens her Blessing - her gift of magic - those dreams reveal themselves to be prophetic and lead her - and her heart - into war, where her life is changed forever. Called to service by a Queen she knows only by name, Meg is taken to the capital city to be trained as a Seer, where her gift opens the doors to secrets long forgotten.

A coming-of-age story in the traditional sense, the difference here lies in the telling. Shillitoe demonstrates that fantasy can be used as a vehicle to explore adult and contemporary themes amidst a sweeping saga of prophetic dreams, war-torn kingdoms and the heavy ties of a forgotten legacy. All the magic, action and wonder that is typical to the genre is present, but with the added style that marks Shillitoe as a writer worth reading.

[Elizabeth Ambrey]

I found it unusual to find a fantasy novel set in an Australian setting. Finding some imagery difficult because of familiarity with the setting. Lets face it though. it is a fantasy novel and waiting to read the next. Thank You Tony.