Anna’s Reviews > Цветок камалейника > Status Update

The final reveal about the Gatekeeper was jaw-dropping, and it made me reassess all the previous events of the story and question if fate brought the heroes together. It’s especially poignant that essentially, each initiation of the Gatekeeper is a sacrifice and a choice, and all of them are about love. Because when it comes down to it, the main choice everyone makes is a choice to sacrifice themselves for love.

Radda’s main purpose in the story was to trigger a deus ex machine (almost literally), and her romance with Brent happened over two days – but on the grand scale, the whole story takes place during eight days, and everyone triggers a deus ex machine at some point. And Radda herself is such a likable character, fragile at first sight but with a will of steel and heart full of fire, that it’s easy to overlook any flaws

The characters are not as deep and layered as it’s usual in Gromyko’s books, but Brent is definitely a complex one. He devoted himself to serving the Gatekeeper, yet he still thinks himself unworthy. He keeps breaking all the rules of his order to find and protect his goddess, and he agonizes over every choice. He keeps thinking of himself as a killer, yet all he’d ever done is protect his friends and the Gatekeeper.

Radda is probably the smartest of the gang – while Jai and ErTar give off an impression of having just one braincell between them, and Brent possesses a mix of learned knowledge and life experience, Radda is the one who actually thinks stuff through, analyzes the situation and asks all the right questions. She is also the one who can see into the heart of things without getting hung up on the appearances, like Brent.

The more I read about the church of Yggr, the more common metaphor ‘priests are shepherds, and the congregation is their flock’ makes me uncomfortable. Because the shepherds don’t keep sheep simply for the love of animals – they have very practical goals that the cattle wouldn’t have approved of if they knew. And that’s what people are to dhers – nothing but cattle.

When ‘the Border’ was brought up several times, I naturally assumed it to be a normal border between countries. Not a river of lava surrounded by dead forest teeming with eldritch abominations from another world! One more point goes to Olga Gromyko for her wild imagination.

While the villains of the story are priests of the official religion, the religion itself isn’t portrayed as evil. Instead, the religion is a tool used by the evil priests to effectively control ordinary people. In reality, there’s no Beastgod, and probably no Yggr, and even the Gatekeeper isn’t exactly a goddess – there’s only the forces of life manipulated by priests of Yggr and the Gatekeeper alike.

The only significant female character, Radda, appears almost 80% into the story, but she’s worth it. At first, Radda appears to be comically naïve and even dangerously stupid with her religious zeal – until it’s revealed that she’d been a slave. Servitude to the god was the only way to freedom for her, and she was well aware that she would die in the process and didn’t mind it, making her character way more tragic.

While there are obvious things that make Yggr’s Kingdom stand out, like the existence of magic and fantastic creatures, there are also more subtle details. A bear is considered to be a mythical animal, Jai had never seen a lizard, and even ErTar, who’s a hunter spending a lot of time in the wilds, had only seen fish in human-made ponds. Something’s rotten in this kingdom, but Brent is the only one who notices.

Considering that Jai and ErTar had seen Brent die before their eyes and come back to life, they were very quick to believe that he’d been killed for real without seeing his body or any solid proof of his death… A building collapsing on anyone is no joke, but Brent has access to magic that works completely differently than the magic of Yggr’s priests, and Jai and ErTar know that – but they don’t even doubt his death.