Seabird

by Sherry Thompson

When Cara Marshall is transported to Narenta, she is proclaimed
champion of its people against the sorcerous daemagos. Amid the
grateful welcomes, Cara protests that she has been "world-napped," and wants neither her title nor her mission. "They've got the wrong person and they're going to get me killed because they won't admit it." With no knowledge of weapons or magic, can she save the Narentans and find her way home?

Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

356 pages, Paperback

First published January 2, 2008

About the author

I'm SherryT, a fantasy author trapped on the U.S. east coast & longing to live on my fantasy world of Narenta but not during a war!
I enjoy helping fellow-writers & appreciate being helped; amateur photography; creating art by hand or graphics software; music esp filk, folk & world music ex. Putumayo. I like fantasy & mysteries but these days I write more than I read. I watch just a few TV shows a season but I'm very loyal to those I watch. I love 100’s of films. Other interests: ethnic cuisine, dark chocolate, my faith, playing servant to my cats Khiva & Vartha, “wasting time with my friends”, enjoying nature—except ice storms

I worked at a library for 30 years. What's better than being around books every day? Writing them.
I started my 1st Narenta Tumults fantasy "Seabird" in 1979. Writing Narenta #1 was such fun as soon as I finished it, I began its sequel

I began writing short stories in the mid-80's because my writing instructors assigned us short works. Wailing "I write long" gained me no sympathy. I’ve written 40-50 shorts, 33 in my new Tree House Tales collection but I rarely submit the stuph stuffed in the folder because, well, I write long

After retiring from my 1st career, I focused on writing, networking with other authors like my Lost Genre Guild buddies, catching up on manuscript revisions & of course writing new material.

Speaking of which, revised editions of my 1st Narenta novels, Seabird & Earthbow, will be available in early 2015. Marooned, the 3rd novel set on Narenta will appear later in 2015.

Two other Narenta novels still need work. The Gryphon & the Basilisk aka “The Behemoth” aka "Its Wordiness" not so secretly wants to be a trilogy & keeps saying "Feed me!" G&B looks more like a gigantic plant every day. I'm beginning to worry.

Another Narenta novel is having an identity crisis & has asked to be called, "Da Boid, da Tree-Rat 'n' da Loser”. As a loving book-mama, I’m giving it time to work through its issues.

Reviews

[Shannon Winward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I met author Sherry Thompson in a critique group, which is how I came to know the Narentan series. Book Three, so far as I know, is yet unpublished - a terrible shame I hope to soon see rectified, assuming the snippets that I saw speak truly of its quality.

I admired Sherry's writing from the first session. She has a gravitas and confidence that is essential for building great fantasy worlds; a mind for detail, large and small, a stamina for story arc and scope that echoes some of my favorite authors - Tad Williams, George R.R. Martin, Tolkein. She is the real deal.

I asked to read SEABIRD (Book One) and EARTHBOW (Book Two) in order to become better acquainted with the world of Narenta and Sherry's epic (and I do mean epic) fantasy tale. There is so much history alluded to in the later book, so complex a world, I felt I really needed to start at the beginning. Hence, this review.

I should note: it took me a very long time to finish SEABIRD - six months, I believe. This is not a comment on the writing or story - Sherry is a talented author, with lovely turns of phrase and an obvious devotion to the characters and mythos she has created. My problem was more a matter of genre, I suppose. By that I mean, SEABIRD is most definitely a Young Adult fantasy, and I am not, per se, a YA reader. I don't mind stories where adolescent characters take center stage - indeed, I've written some - but a novel with a persistent teenaged POV and sensibilities is hard for me to relate to. It took effort, at times, to stay invested in the book, rather than picking up something more my style.

That said, SEABIRD is not juvenile. Hardly. This is a well-planned, well-executed classic quest story told with real passion. This is a book with heft - fast-moving, surely, but requiring an investment of imagination that fans of the genre love to give.

I believe that most fantasy readers, YA fans or otherwise, will enjoy SEABIRD. It is reminiscent of the NARNIA series, with its threads of magic and faith and, as the first of a series, it lays a compelling foundation. SEABIRD leaves its readers with a promise for more fantastic exploration and adventure. I have yet to read the second installment but, having seen what Sherry still has in the wings, I know for a fact that the Narentan series only gets bigger and better.

[Forrest Schultz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cara-The-Feisty Rules in Debut of Narentan Fantasy Series


A Review of

Sherry Thompson Seabird: Book I of The Narentan Tumults (Grayson, GA:
Gryphonwood Press, 2007)
352 pp $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-9795738-2-8


Reviewed by: Forrest W. Schultz





As a long time enthusiast of the literary works of C. S. Lewis I am gratified at the contemporary long-overdue widespread recognition of some of these works, esp. of The Chronicles of Narnia. The downside to this, of course, is the danger that "wannabe" authors will exploit the popularity by producing crass imitations of the Narnian tales.



For this reason I was disturbed that Sherry Thompson has chosen to name her fantasy world "Narenta" because it looks so much like "Narnia" that there may be those who, without further ado, will consign it to the crass imitation category. This would be a huge mistake! Narnia fans will love Narenta but it is by no means a crude copy of Narnia.



The feisty contemporary American teenager Cara Marshall transported to Narenta in Seabird bears little resemblance to the mid-twentieth century British Pevensee children transported to Narnia in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and the natures of their respective missions and experiences are also quite distinct and Narenta is quite a different world from Narnia. It would require a lengthy essay to detail and discuss all the Narentan/Narnian differences.



What Narenta and Narnia have in common is the story outline and the nature of the stage on which the stories are enacted. The story outline consists of humans transported to a fantasy world where they accomplish a salvific mission and then are returned to Earth with a resulting increase in spiritual maturity. The stage for the stories is a fantasy world imbued with spiritual analogies and containing talking animals and ruled by one of these animals who is a Christ-figure in the story. In Narnia the Lion Aslan is the Christ-figure; in Narenta the Seabird Alphesis is the Christ-figure. (Narnia is a fantasy world for children transportees, so that a land-bound animal is appropriate for a Christ-figure; Narenta is a fantasy world for adolescent transportees so that a more lofty incarnation is appropriate -- thus a Seabird is the Christ-figure there.) An entire book could be written on the spiritual analogies in Narents (and Narnia); all I wish to say here is that to me the most striking spiritual analogy on Narenta is its "Living Water". And it is significant that the weapon Cara is shown wielding on the books cover is "The Sword Of Living Water", and that her last act on Narenta is to give orders concerning where it is to be housed after her departure.



The Pevensees, since they are children, require several trips to Narnia to gain the desired spiritual maturity, while Cara requires only one trip to Narenta -- she arrives as an adoleschent and leaves as an adult, which is dramatically depicted in a climactic scene where she perceives one of deepest of C. S. Lewis's spiritual insights as she faces down her opponent the sorceress Rabada. As Cara utters this insight, the reader is suddenly struck with the fact that she is now a woman; she is no longer a girl! And only after she attains this insight does she deliver the coup d' etat which demolishes the triad of sorcerors and thereby accomplishes her mission.



This deep spiritual principle which Cara discerned here was dramatically depicted by C. S. Lewis in his adult fiction space novel Perelandra. The principle itself, which Lewis states and discusses in one of his didactic works, is simply this: repeated sinning eventually depersonalizes the sinner. If, for instance, a man continues to whimper, eventually he will BECOME nothing but a whimper, i.e. there will no longer be a person behind the whimper. In Perelandra the villain, a demon-possessed man, eventually becomes what Lewis calls an Unman.



Cara, perceiving this principle, calls her nemesis a "nothing" at first, which she later amends to a "black hole", which sucks in and destroys life, but which has no life of its own. Here Thompson actually one-ups her mentor. C. S. Lewis did not and could not draw this analogy because black holes had not yet been discovered by astronomers in his day, when he wrotethe Narnia books and the space trilogy.



The "tumult" faced by Cara in Seabird is the first of seven tumults prophesied for Narenta. The second tumult is the subject of Thompson's second Narentan novel which has just been published. I shall read and review it soon.



There is a good deal of humor in Seabird, mainly because Cara's conversations are filled with American figures of speech and American teen jargon. Most of this is spoken but a lot of it is Cara talking to herself. This, plus her feistiness in telling the land's top scholars and kings and generals just what she thinks makes for a very lively and often funny story.



This spunk is there from the very outset when Cara vehmently objects to being regarded as the land's deliverer and demands to be returned to Earth because "your magician grabbed someone from the wrong planet!". It takes her quite a while before she finally agrees to accept her mission.



It does not take long for the reader to realize that the Narenta story is imbued with a very different atmosphere from the Narnia story. This has to be the case when you consider that Cara is an American adolescent born in the 1990s and that the Pevensees are British children born in the 1930s. You do not need to read very far before it becomes crystal clear that in no form or shape or fashion is Narenta a "knock-off" of Narnia.



So, is Narenta to be considered as worthy of comparison with Narnia?? I believe that Seabird is in the same league as Narnia's first volume (LWW). Let us hope that the remaining books in the Narentan Tumults Series are as good as the first. This will not be easy! Cara will be a tough act to follow! The challenge Thompson faces is creating characters who are deserving of following in her train and of stories which continue the great start she made with Seabird.





June 3, 2010

[Lynette Caulkins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Years ago, I immersed myself in fantasy reading for quite some time, and this was a fun return to that genre. I really enjoyed a new world starring a female protagonist. Even though she's a teen, this book sits on the line between YA and Adult reading. While I didn't feel that her behavior was completely true to life (even a teen knows that very serious times warrant using formal language and respect versus tangy slang), I enjoyed the intermeshing of Conrad-ian "Mythical Quest," Narnian transport between worlds and setup of contained episodic series, and interesting cultural setting with the seabird god figure.

This book is noted to be the first of a trilogy, but like the Narnia series, it is self-contained. I was really glad about that, as I can't find any copies of the companions. You will not be left hanging in mid-air if you read only this volume.

I'm not sure why this was laborious for me to read, and am unable to pinpoint that as a factor of the writing style or of the busyness in my life at the moment. My husband is breezing through it right now. While I rate this in the 3.0-3.5 range, I find it very disappointing that I can't get ahold of the sequels.

[R. L. Copple · Rating 4 out of 5]

One might be tempted to think a story where a character gets whisked away to a strange fantasy world would be full of trite fantasy plots. You’ll find none of that here. No elves, no dwarfs, wizards, dragons. Instead, you get enchanters, young ones, seabirds, and various people set in a well-crafted world, deep in its own history and cultures. Just exploring this new world with Cara is its own reward as Sherry Thompson does a great job of putting the reader firmly into this new world with detail and descriptions that paint a picture, but don’t get in the way of the story.

But it doesn’t stop there. While Lewis-like in its basic premise, the allegory, while there, is with a lighter touch. The Narentian god, Alphesis, is obviously an analogy to Jesus Christ. The character only appears at key moments and doesn’t devolve into a deus ex machina solution to the dangers faced, a problem Lewis had in some of his Narnia novels. Nor would the secular reader feel they were preached at.

What you do have is a modern fantasy along the lines of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams, but with Sherry Thompson’s own stamp firmly on it, making it her story. Cara Marshall is pulled into this new world, where she goes from being the scared teenager, to reluctant hero, to finding in herself the ability to sacrifice her own desires for those of others. The character arc is well built and satisfying.

The writing is well done. It has a big of a choppy feel to it at times, but this is due to the character’s thought patterns being on the fragmented side. Less than a handful of times I had to stop and think where she was going, but those were far and few in between, and didn’t distract me. While you might spot a typo here and there, the grammar is clean, the writing in most cases clear, and the story well-told.

The story does get a little slow at the beginning as Cara fights her calling to save these people, but it quickly accelerates and the action grows intense. There is a good touch of humor and pathos to the story. Death is a reality, and Cara faces her own doubts and deals with them in multiple ways. The struggle feels real, and I found myself rooting for her.

This is an enjoyable read with an original story, a rich world, and a solid cast of characters, both the main character and the supporting cast. The story is great for young adults, even young teens, but will be appreciated by adults as well who enjoy a solid fantasy that isn’t like everything else out there.

I recommend reading this book if you enjoy a good fantasy story.

[Kat Heckenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seabird is one of the better fantasy books I've read. It's technically YA, but it has appeal for all ages. The story is solid, the writing skilled, the characterization strong, and the world vivid. I found myself irritated when I had to put it down, and anxious to pick it back up again. It doesn't get bogged down with ridiculously long and complex battle scenes like many fantasy novels do, but there is plenty of action and swordplay. I especially loved the Seabirds themselves, and the unique use of magic. The story has classic elements--like a quest and a prophecy--but they are woven in a very original fashion.