A small step on a journey, a huge leap as a writer
Seeker Volume 1 is the first volume of Azure Whitewood's new fantasy series Seeker. This time Whitewood made great use of what they learned in their first published novel, Help! My Little Sister is Disappearing!, creating a nice new fantasy world with interesting characters and an interesting setting.
To start off, let's talk about what is, according to me, the most essential part of any fantasy or sci-fi book: the worldbuilding. Whitewood manages to create a very interesting world, taking place about 1000 years after the human-demon wars aka. the purification wars, and after the humans supposedly eradicated the demon race. In this world people called “seekers” emerged. These seekers have a strange urge to search for ancient spells, which is, unlike modern spells, usable by all races, and to decipher them. The setting is interesting and Whitewood doesn't just drop everything, but keeps a lot of information secret and through that creates a mystery that you keep wondering about as you read.
However, one problem I had as I read was that I couldn't figure out why seekers was so hated in the world. The only thing I could grasp would be that they could figure out ancient spells. However, in my head that would probably cause them to be treated as gods or something, as they are the only ones who can decipher these spells, which would make them essential in magic research. A line like “... because the church calls all ancient spells heretic” would've solved this and not have made me wonder about it. Another thing is that it's never clear whether seekers can use the spells they decipher, since Whitewood implies it at occasions, but the Main Character, Roger, never uses them, not even in fights and considering he should have deciphered about 211 spells since becoming a seeker (assuming he takes about 15 days to track, find and decipher each spell), and there must have been at least one attack or defence spell amongst them.
Now, to the characters. Both Roger and the demoness Lili are quite interesting. They are used efficiently to explore the interesting world Whitewood built. The only problem I had with the characters is that Roger feels like he switches personality at first he gives of the impression of being cold, practical person, then he becomes way too compassionate and decides to spare the life of a knight that tried to kill him, just to go back to being calculating.
The story is built to last many volumes ahead and that is noticeable as this book contains a lot of info-dumps and new information, and feels a lot like a worldbuilding volume. I hope that the amount of info-dumps decrease in future, however not disappears completely.
In the second half of the book, when they start to move towards the new spell, I got a feeling of “Why didn't they just take the eagles to Mordor?” when we know that Lili can fly. Roger says something about them maybe getting noticed, however I feel that this was a weak argument, especially with what happened afterwards.
Overall, this was a great step for Whitewood in terms of writing and they seem a lot more comfortable writing this than their last book. I look forward to following their evolution as a writer towards greater heights and to future volumes!
I give this book a 6/10