Reviewed by Araminta Matthews
Having grown up with my father's tireless nightly readings of Tolkein's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books , I have always had a special kinship with the fantasy genre. From J.R.R. Tolkein to Piers Anthony to Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman, I consumed fantasy novels in my youth like air-popped popcorn. The trouble is that, in my early adult years and through the course of my college education in creative writing, I began to see some glaring problems inherent to the genre. Chiefly, the hero's journey paradigm and the decided lack of new stories, new ideas, and new exhibitions in fantasy fiction. Perhaps other than Ursula LeGuinn and Joss Whedon, whose pain-stakingly well-thought-out universes are new and old all at once, there hasn't been much in the way of original fiction in fantasy since Tolkein's Middle Earth and Lewis's Narnia – and even those tip a hat to Greek and Fairy mythologies that existed millennia before them.
It is with this in mind that I reviewed Noss's book The Flame within harboring a grain of salt beneath my tongue as I descended into its pages. While the writing is good – I would go so far as to say clever in many instances – the story is wholly unoriginal. With the proverbial battle between good and evil played out by the Imperials and the Liberation, the story fairly reeks of the offspring of Star Wars and Middle Earth with a healthy sprinkling of Dune glittering the surface. With settings like Almach Tur abd characters like Aralon and Mist Elf Kiyana, it almost reads like Tolkein fan-fiction and not its own fictional metaverse. The fact that it is even the first book of a trilogy even rings of Tolkein and Lucas. Still, there is hope.
At
the same time, the story is a fun and easy read – the kind of read one
expects of, say, The Dragonlance Series in that it tackles fantastical
fiction, and couples it with medieval historical battle scenes. The
scenes are fraught with magic and wrought with bittersweet loyalty for
the side of goodness and sinful capitulation on the side of evil – all
everything you expect from a novel in this genre. To
that end, it is not a bad read and one that I would recommend to anyone
who simply enjoys a good fantasy story. But,
anyone like me who is seeking the next level of fiction in the fantasy
genre, the next Middle Earth or even the next Death Star, this book is
not it. This book is simply another
cartridge in
the tired game system of fantasy battering out another role-playing
game-induced storyline. Expect to see this
book
replicated briefly in a free, privately-developed Massive Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Game in the near future. Perhaps
Amaranth Games, producers of the highly addictive,
original-Legend-of-Zelda-esque game "Aveyond", might hook this author
up. Who knows? It
could be a fun match. Let's just say at
this time "The Keeper's Garden Trilogy" is not fully operational. Perhaps by the second book, Noss will
incinerate my first impression.