Mornnovin

by Alyssa Marie Bethancourt

Loralíenasa Raia is the last surviving member of an elven family that has existed since the dawn of recorded time, and the weight of that responsibility has shaped her entire life. Her people stand upon the brink of extinction after a brutal war with humanity drove them into hiding.

When an ancient avenging force threatens to destroy all of Asrellion, Loralíenasa must decide whether to risk her own people’s survival in order to stop what seems like an inevitable apocalypse for the very humans who once sought to purify the world of her kind. As if saving humans isn’t bad enough, she must also contend with being forced to accept their help when it seems she might not be able to do it on her own.

In a tale of pride, prejudice, and powerful magic, the ghosts of the bloody past give battle to a future where peace might prevail if hearts are allowed to change. And as Loralíenasa has always been told by her elders, elves are incapable of change.

Genres: Fantasy

496 pages, Paperback

Published April 9, 2019

About the author

Alyssa is a lifelong fantasy fan and all around Nerd of Many Colors who has been writing her own stories since the first grade. She’s into trees, water, books, cool science facts, photography, dogs, music, and making things. After spending 36 years burning to death in the Arizona desert, she ran away to the frozen moonscape of southwestern Pennsylvania, where she now lives with the most adorable husband and husky (who are not the same person.) She shares her nerdy scribblings with Pittsburgh writer’s group Rust and Ink and has grand plans for many fantasy novels yet to come.

Reviews

[MacKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome to my overly long, gushing review (essay) on why you should buy Mornnovin and read it I M M E D I A T E L Y.

Sometimes, you read a novel that hits all the plot and character tropes you want while also subverting your expectations entirely. And in a genre replete with boring white medieval pseudo-European fantasy (though that has been changing here recently), such a novel is a diamond in the rough, and difficult to find.

That’s Mornnovin. That’s this book. And it’s self-published, to boot. What a gem. Here’s why you have to get your hands on a copy of this novel.

An original, timely, relevant plot with delightful twists and turns. There’s a lot to take in here, but first… The elf culture, man! The elf culture! These guys are like goth goals gold. Nearly eliminated when the humans launched a genocidal campaign against them 30 centuries before, Bethancourt’s elves now live in a secluded valley that humans don’t know about. The remaining human cultures believe that the elves—and by extension, magic—are extinct. As is explained fairly early in the novel, the elves have a cultural tendency for melancholy and mourning as a result of their long secrecy and their near total annihilation. It makes for some kickin’ good #aesthetic and some heckin’ bad #homeenvironment for our protagonist, Loríen.

Combine this crafted cultural complexity with a villain who’s apparently held a special grudge for that whole “humans committing elf genocide” thing about 3,000 years ago, and you’ve got a recipe for a plot fraught with old wounds, old (and new) clashes, and old characters under new guises. It’s a roller coaster I’m looking forward to getting back on for the sequel. (Where’s the dang sequel??!?!?)

Complex, subversive, well-thought-out fantasy world-building. Tolkien, GRR Martin, JK Rowling—eat your hearts out. What we have here is fantasy world-building crafted with a complexity and care to rival the masters. Everywhere you look in this quest plot, there’s world-building detail woven carefully and cleverly into the fabric of the story. From the smallest tidbits, such as physical gestures that the different fantasy races and cultures use as part of conversation, to the largest overarching plot points—such as the humans’ attempt to exterminate the elves in a War of Purification 10 centuries before the start of Mornnovin’s story—the world-building bundles you, the reader, up in its coat and takes you on a merry ride.

Here’s just a taste, which also does a solid job of showcasing the marvelous prose:

Over the last seven years at war, [Naoise] had become all too familiar with the works of every one of the major Telrishti swordmakers. Farid used an alloy of his own invention, devised for its flexibility, that gave off a distinctive rainbow sheen when tempered. Husam forged blades that were uglier than a hyena’s smile, but they retained an edge like no other. Swords from the foundry of Zahir were beautiful, works of art each one. Those made by Raza had a tendency to break when met with a direct parry at the ricasso. It mattered, knowing which weapons he was up against in any given battle, and Naoise knew them all.

A diverse cast of characters who will make you feel a whole spectrum of emotions. I didn’t ask to care ferociously about Loralíenasa (that’s not as hard to pronounce as it looks, I promise) and her band of not-so-merry-men-and-one-cranky-younger-sister but boy howdy did I ever end up caring about all of them. It’s… really, really hard to pick a favorite. There’s…

- Loralienasa/Loríen, the novel’s protagonist and an ice queen with a heart of gold. She just wants what’s best for her stuffy, constantly mourning, trapped-in-hiding elven people, but of course, Loralienasa’s people have the immortal stubbornness to make protecting them quite a challenge.
- Naoise (pronounced “Neesha”), the love interest and deuteragonist of the series, a brave and kindhearted human prince who would make Aragorn son of Arathorn green with character envy. I would take a bullet (a sword?) for Naoise, that’s all you need to know.
- Dairinn, Naoise’s smooth-talking, buff older brother whose fires Naoise spends a lot of time putting out.
- Lyn, a somewhat foul-mouthed, chatterbox of an elven princess who was raised not knowing she was a princess, much less an elf.
- Sovoqatsu, the double-battle-axed guard elf who is a little too good at killing people to make the folks around him entirely comfortable.
- Cole, an ex-mercenary turned bodyguard who’s been given one mission and one mission only: Keep Lyn safe. No one told him she’d make this mission as hard as possible by generally being a brash blabbermouth.

...and more I don’t have time to write about because I don’t want to spoil anyone who decides to read!

A layered, compelling conflict with a deadly intriguing villain. Listen, I’ve read… a lot of fantasy novels, okay? I’ve run the gamut on villains and their various motivations: power, madness, knowledge, money. It’s impossible to do a completely unique villain, but Alyssa Bethancourt manages to write a familiar (and somehow relatable?) evil with a fresh and complicated face. I had a lot of fun and trepidation getting to know the antagonist, the sorcerer called Katakí, and I think you will too.

An entirely new conlang?! Do you like constructed languages? Are you the kind of person who knows how to speak Klingon or has a tattoo in Tolkien’s elvish? Uh, well, then, have I got some juicy news for you: Bethancourt has constructed an entirely new, functional fantasy language for her elves—and it’s one that’s fun to learn and beautiful to speak. She also does a masterful job of integrating the usage of this language—and the barriers it presents between the characters—seamlessly into the plot and action.

He continued to study her with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension, as if expecting to find at any moment that she was made of smoke and would disappear. “You saved my life. And dog’s.”
The conspicuous lapse in his otherwise flawless Elven seemed off. “That should be ‘my dog’s,’” she corrected, watching his reaction with interest.
He chuckled sheepishly. “No, his name is Aiqa.” The use of the word dog as a name was understandably confusing. “It was meant to annoy my brother . . .”

The conlang, while fun, is a vital part of the story and how these characters relate to each other, which somehow makes it even more fun. I’m not even the type of fantasy reader who gets deeply into constructed languages, but I’ll admit becoming invested in Bethancourt’s due entirely to the high quality of the writing.

Romance!!!!!! uwu. If you’re into elf-on-human shipping in your fantasy worlds, this is the book for you. Yeah, trust me, I have good taste, just read it. Plus, queer characters! And a stunning lack of homophobia and gender politics! Hooray! Sometimes you just want to read about elves and dudes kissin’ without, like, misogyny being at the heart of it all. You won’t find any of that in Mornnovin--the plot derives its conflict from the world’s own rich internal tensions. Naoise and Loríen are a lot like Aragorn and Arwen, except Naoise’s like Aragorn if he sipped daily Respect Women juice and went to an emotionally mature therapist and Loríen’s like Arwen if Arwen fought with a sword, enjoyed sarcasm, and had a bit of a cold temper. So pretty much just better than Arwen and Aragorn really. Go read it.

The AESTHETIC of it all. There are a million examples of descriptive prose I could pull to show off Bethancourt’s talent and to show off the richness of this crafted world, so I picked one at random.

[Lyn] stopped inside the doorway of the Royal Vault, and stared, and discovered what riches looked like.
Not piles of them, though. The room looked surprisingly neat, given how much stuff was in there. Row upon row of the glittering trappings of luxury, trinkets and armor and jewels more beautiful than anything she could have imagined, basked in the light of a cut glass window in the high ceiling. So many crowns, delicate or ornate or imposing, all of them finely crafted in patterns evoking nature and flaunting staggering wealth. Necklaces on velvet displays. Colorful bejeweled gowns on mannequins, like a silent crowd of court ladies admiring the spectacle of the vault. Silver bowls, crystal chalices, and giant gilt-frame mirrors. A suit of armor so brightly polished it was almost white. Weapons far too pretty to be functional. Boxes carved of strange woods. Baubles and ornaments who purpose she could not even guess at and had no name for, resting importantly on marble plinths.

Even when describing over-the-top opulence, not a word of Bethancourt’s prose is out of place. It has the subtlety of Diana Wynne Jones in quality, such that hundreds of sentences sneak by you without you registering their passage, so gently has the writing ushered you into the story and into Bethancourt’s world of elves, humans, and fairies.

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So? Do I really need to say anything else? What are you waiting for? Go support a highly talented indie writer--go read Mornnovin!

[Jon Skocik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elves, castles, magic, kings and queens, swordplay, imaginary languages – yes, we’ve seen all this before, and Alyssa Marie Bethancourt’s debut novel, Mornnovin has them in droves. That is not to say these elements are automatically tired in any way. There’s a reason we keep revisiting them. But in the wrong hands, they can admittedly feel stale or even silly. Fortunately, Ms. Bethancourt knows her genre, and navigates the material with ease. The best fantasy will make you forget that it’s fantasy, allowing you to completely buy in to what you’re reading. Mornnovin is such a novel. Beyond this, however, and perhaps more importantly, it gives us a wholly fresh perspective in that the author is autistic, and her elven characters are also coded as such.

Bethancourt’s elves are emotional basket cases. Their feelings run the gamut, their internal lives raging storms of passion, guilt, and self-recrimination, yet they are expected to maintain a veneer of stoicism that would make Mr. Spock proud, even to the point of making elaborate hand gestures to indicate their feelings rather than allow a genuine emotion to reach their faces. These elves are no Vulcans, though, and their ability to maintain this cool facade is, shall we say, less well-perfected than their sci-fi counterparts. This is, in fact, an amazingly on-point depiction of the autistic experience. People on the spectrum spend most of their lives learning to hide what they’re really feeling, having been told over and over that their expressions of emotion are inappropriate. For this reason, autistics are often viewed as cold, rude, and distant. But this is largely learned behavior, the only reaction that makes any sense when it seems like everything you do is wrong.

That Bethancourt’s autism stand-ins are literally not human reflects the feeling many on the spectrum experience of not really being a part of humanity, of being aliens in their own world. This is further illustrated by the state of isolation in which the elves of Mornnovin have placed themselves. They live in Evlédíen, also called the Valley, hidden away from the rest of the world to protect themselves from the humans who once tried to exterminate them. The Purification, as the humans call it, could be viewed as a parallel for the erasure experienced by autistic people every day. Often, the lives and perspectives of the autistic community are ignored. The clueless and ignorant have even gone as far as to say that autistic people are not even really people, and that those on the spectrum actually have no inner life, no genuine feelings or sense of identity. What is this if not a low-key extermination, if not in fact, at least in spirit?

Onto this stage emerges our heroine, Loralianasa Raia, nicknamed Lorien. Though she’s over a hundred years old, she’s only just on the cusp of adulthood in elf terms. As the crown princess whose parents have long-since been murdered, she now faces the unwelcome responsibility of ruling her people. To make matters worse, this coincides with a global war among the humans as well as a sinister plot that soon drags the elves back onto the world stage. Lorien now faces the almost unthinkable decision to expose the existence of her people to the rest of the world in an effort to save the very people who once brought them to the brink of extinction. This funhouse lens coming-of-age story perfectly illustrates the exaggerated gravity that an autistic person faces upon joining the adult world. In much the same way that Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer used monsters as a metaphor for growing up and learning adult responsibility, so does Bethancourt use her fantasy landscape of imagined cultures in a global war engineered by a vengeful sorcerer.

Of course, no coming-of-age story would be complete without a romance, and Bethancourt does not fail to deliver the goods. The concept of lovers bound by a telepathic link has perhaps been done to death in numerous online fanfics, but this manages to feel fresh, perhaps because of the earnestness with which it is written. It might also have to do with how truly endearing the love interest is. Naoise (pronounced Nee-shuh) Raynesley is the prince of Grenlec, a kingdom at war with their longtime rival, Telrisht. We meet him in the first chapter and there’s instant sparkage with Lorien. He’s bright, kind, open-minded, thoughtful, and witty. Indeed, he borders on being a Mary Sue, though thankfully never quite crosses the line. By the end of their first encounter, Naoise and Lorien are mystically joined, and though separated afterward for a large chunk of the story, their love grows stronger and stronger through the psychic bond they don’t even know they share. Visiting each other in dreams, they become each other’s only solace from the hellscape their world has become – though Naoise arguably has it worse, being that he’s stuck on the front lines of a battle that seems frustratingly unwinnable for reasons that will eventually become ominously clear.

As the story unfolds, we’re introduced to a colorful cast of supporting characters as intriguing and memorable as anything offered up by J.K. Rowling, Marvel, or even Tolkien himself. There’s Lorien’s sister Lyn, who having been raised away from her people has never learned their stoicism and therefore expresses herself with some delightfully creative profanity. We’ve also got Naoise’s womanizing brother, who manages to be charming despite being a total heel; a mercenary named Cole who struggles to outlive his shady past; the brusque elf warrior Sovoqatsu questing to fulfill a sense of purpose; and Sefaro, a good-natured ambassador from a distant country who serves as the moral compass of the group. Aside from the main party, there’s Lorien’s taskmaster guardian, Tomanasil; Naoise’s overbearing father, King Lorn; and a mysterious fairy named Sun.

But the greatest gem, for me at least, is the villain, Kataki Kurome, a sorcerer grieving over the murder of his wife at the hands of the humans. He engineers the war between Grenlec and Telrisht as a way to thin the herd and lessen the task he’s set for himself of annihilating humanity. He easily could have been a thinly-written mustache twirler, but Bethancourt gives him depth, pain, and a cold civility that at once makes him relatable and utterly terrifying. His cold determination, detached sense of purpose, devious craftiness, and sheer power make him seem utterly unbeatable. This, coupled with his age and inflexibility make him the perfect foil for the young and idealistic Lorien, who was already overwhelmed by the adult world even before the shit hit the fan.

No character is ignored, and Bethancourt not only gives depth and individuality to all of her primary characters, but breathes life and personality into even the most minor characters. Such a task naturally requires a lot of breathing room, and Mornnovin is not a short book. But it never overstays its welcome, and indeed the epic scope of the proceedings demands the necessary space to unfold. Beyond that, the pace never wavers, and the novel’s bulk is never daunting. Quite the contrary. This is the kind of expertly-woven story that draws you right in and keeps you anticipating each new development. Mornnovin isn’t just one of the best fantasy stories I’ve ever read. It’s easily one of the best novels I’ve read in recent memory, and I eagerly await the next installment in the series, due out next year.

Mornnovin is printed by Dogwood House press and is available from all major online booksellers.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

How many times have I picked up a self-published novel hoping that maybe this time I’ve found one of those ‘hidden gems’ that everyone talks about? Time after time I’ve started such a book only to find it full of grammatical errors, poor plotting, and zero character development. What do people have against editors or even a decent beta reader?

With this book, Mornnovin: The Way of the Falling Star, I found that treasure. From the first paragraph, it obvious Bethencourt spent a great deal of time polishing her story. If there were mistakes in there, I didn’t see them, and I’m very picky. She creates a fantastical world but somehow avoids old tired tropes so each character is a refreshing change from used up stereotypes.

There is Loralíenasa, the Elven Princess of a hidden Elven kingdom on the verge of extinction and someone is killing her people. She must go on a quest, yes, a quest, to find out is behind this and save them. Along for the ride are various humans, including her love interest, Prince Naoise, and my favorite character, her twin sister Lynn. The author subverted the cliche and gave the ‘feisty’ characteristics to a secondary female character, rather than the heroine.

The characters are all fleshed out, the storyline flows. There is nothing in here that takes you out of the story. It's not all sunshine and light, there is darkness and sadness, but it builds toward a satisfying conclusion.

Read it. You won’t be sorry.

[ireallyhatecornnuts ireallyhatecornnuts]

Alyssa Marie Bethancourt converted me to a fantasy fan.

I am not a high fantasy fan. It's just not my genre. But this book is so well-done. It's obvious that the author understands her characters completely; they are an obvious part of her and have clearly been with her for a long time. They come alive in a way that so many other characters don't, even the ones you only meet once. Even the ones who are only with you for a short time. You mourn characters that die. You celebrate close calls. You cry over bittersweet victories and hiccup through it because the world is broken, but it's alive. It's going to be okay.

You WILL cry or cheer aloud. You will love these characters and the beautiful and broken world of Asrellion. You will want to pester the author for Asrellion lore. You will want to write fanfiction.

You will love it. I guarantee it.

Please read this book. It's amazing and I want to know what's next.

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh wow, this was SO good. I finished it the day I started reading because I couldn't put it down! The characters are endearing, the political intrigue engaging, the escalation of tension perfectly executed... Often I don't read books until the sequels all come out, but this was well worth reading immediately. The ending was satisfying emotionally but I'm still so invested in the characters and love stories and the rebuilding of what was lost, I look forward to reading more!
The darker plot points were balanced with humor and love, the descriptions took me there vividly, and why haven't you bought this book yet?

[Keos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is so damn good! Keeps you on the edge of your seat, while also being realistic to life. The world building is beautiful and consistent throughout. The characters are brave and good, yet flawed and wonderfully diverse. Fished it in 2 days and eager to read the sequel: Trajelon.

[Elina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!