Rachel Starr Thomson

Raven’s Ladder is the third book in the four-book Auralia Thread, a startlingly poetic, deeply spiritual fantasy series that begins with Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight.

The story dawns on a displaced people: The people of House Abascar, led by the young king Cal-Raven and his faithful guardsman Tabor Jan, have moved into a network of caves after the collapse of their house in a cataclysmic earthquake. Cal-Raven dreams of building New Abascar according to his childlike dreams, filling it with the beauty glimpsed in Auralia’s colors and following the footsteps of the Keeper, a strange forest creature he has come to revere almost as deity—but which remains mysterious and out of reach.

An unexpected encounter with the Keeper charges Cal-Raven’s faith and sends him on a journey to find the perfect settling place for his people. But even as he travels into the north, a menace from the ground threatens the caves, and Tabor Jan is forced to lead the people out. The refugees are discovered by Bel Amica’s beastman-hunting Captain Ryllion, and they have no choice but to accept the hospitality of House Bel Amica—a wealthy and exotic house which, under the influence of the follow-your-heart moon-spirit religion, has become a sort of Vanity Fair.

The Bel Amican heiress Cyndere and her faithful attendant Emeriene do what they can to care for the refugees, even as Tabor Jan and Cal-Raven fight to keep Abascar from losing its identity in Bel Amica’s seductive pleasures and the religion of the Seers. But theirs are not the only endeavours in the Expanse. The Seers are slowly spreading their power, and in the wastelands to the east, cursed Cent Regus beastmen are rising to new power.

There, in the ruins of House Cent Regus, Cal-Raven’s faith will sustain its greatest blow.

Raven’s Ladder is rich, powerful, and thought-provoking. Its prose is beautiful; its plot is riveting. This is not a stereotypical fantasy, wherein the good king and his beautiful followers battle the bad king and his beastly ones. In the world of the Expanse, beauty and beastliness mix, and it’s anyone’s guess which will rise to the top. Cal-Raven’s journey is one of faith that any believer will relate to, from the first flush of infatuation into discouragement as he is challenged to hold onto hope despite all odds. In the confusing tangle of emotions, exhaustion, and half-truths that is life, the beauty of art and the power of storytelling point the way back home.

I can still feel the atmosphere of this book weeks after reading it. House Bel Amica is stunningly rendered, exotic and exciting, with its hanging mirrors, ocean air, and rich food. It’s a beautifully seductive place. But the religion underlying it, a message of following your heart, is also seductive, and we watch as this frighteningly familiar mantra (seen any Disney movies lately?) leaves the best of men wide open to deception and turns heroes into monsters.

The characters are extraordinarily human, from the fiery idealist Cyndere, who rebels against the excesses of her house in her desire to help the lost and accursed, to the awakening beastman Jordam, who thinks in metaphors and is beginning to lose his fur, to Prince Cal-Raven, who combines youthful arrogance with burdened leadership and passionate hope. Tabor Jan and Emeriene, who both function as the loyal friends of difficult visionaries, remain two of my favourite characters.

I have loved this series from the start, and it continues to get better. I reread Auralia’s Colors and Cyndere’s Midnight before opening Raven’s Ladder, and I will probably read all three again next year when the final installment comes out. I look forward to the fourth book even as I dread it, because this is a complex story with characters I’m coming to love, and I want to see all their stories treated fully. Bother the demands of the publishing industry that a book be relatively short.

It’s been several weeks since I read my advance copy of Raven’s Ladder, and the story is still lingering with me. This is some of the best fantasy being written today.

A Note to Parents and Young Readers: Overstreet’s books are very moral, but not simplistically so, and some scenes are gory. These are books for discerning readers.

Rael of Reflective Beauty has reviewed Burning Light:

The middle of a series can be a hard book to read and, I expect, to write.  But Rachel Starr Thomson has done very well here.  This second book in her Seventh World Trilogy is just as exciting, just as full of wonder, and even cranked up a few notches from the first book.  It’s much more intense, and dark, and sad.  Characters grow miles deeper.   Wonderful and horrible new places in the Seventh World are explored.  I think even Rachel’s storytelling and word-smithing improved, and that’s saying a lot!

Check out the whole review here . Thanks, Rael! Positive reviews are fuel for The Advent-writing fire.

Rael of Reflective Beauty has posted her review of Worlds Unseen, including this lovely paragraph from an e-mail she sent me. I had a lot of fun reading this review because it’s so well-written — and it points out a few things in the story I really hoped people would notice .

I wanted to thank you for your well-told story of life and death and tears and growing up, of ashes and newness and the bright, starry thread, of monsters and scoundrels and everyday heroes stepping bravely into battle against evil. Thank you for a picture of worlds unseen, of faith that hopes and believes when the night is dark. Of a King who is coming. Oh, I loved it!

Read the whole review here. If you’ve yet to read it, you can download Worlds Unseen for free (in many different e-formats) or buy the trade paperback. Visit the Worlds Unseen page for the appropriate links .

Life is as busy and unpredictable as ever! I’m currently in the Niagara area putting together Soli Deo Gloria Ballet productions for Easter and the summer, praying about a possible open door for performing somewhere else (let’s just say “Olympics 2010″ and leave it at that — no, we won’t be dancing at the Opening Ceremonies, something less monumental!), wondering if I’ll be driving a friend to Ottawa in a few days, and outlining a devotional book that will work in tandem with our Soli summer production. Lots of fun, lots to do.

Jennifer Bogart of Quiverfullfamily.com has written a great review of Tales of the Heartily Homeschooled, which you can read here. Here’s an excerpt:

Each short and snappy, slice-of-life chapter (written by either Thomson or Currey), invites us into the joyous tumult of family life. From “The Battle of Underwear Mountain” — we have one of those — to “Vacuum Cleaners I Have Known” — wherein I found assurance for my husband that ours is not the only home inhabited by clumps of tangled hair on the rug due to its many long-haired occupants — and everything in between, this volume is both frank and comedic.

As an added charming flourish, both Currey and Thomson write with a distinctly homeschooled flair. Sprinkling such gems as “quoth” into the mix, with a sense of precise syntax paired with oddball impressions add to the distinct character of the text. A few times I found myself thinking, “Someone has certainly been reading (or watched) Tolkien and Austen lately.” With my ongoing predilection for vintage vocabulary, I found these stylistic renderings quite endearing.

Thanks for a great review, Jennifer!

April 2000–Zalmoxis Cave, Romania
She was free, for now. The first step . . .

With dagger in hand, Gina Lazarescu faced the cave opening where the sounds of scuffing feet seemed to mark the presence of another. A Collector? One of Jerusalem’s Undead?

Bleeding, she stood still and waited.

Haunt of Jackals opens where I presume Field of Blood left off: in a cave where Regina Lazarescu (“Queen of the Resurrected”) has slain an ancient vampire and torn herself free from thorny bonds; where she is weak, losing blood, and still hunted; where a fight plays out as it has for thousands of years between Good and Evil, between the Alive and the Undead, between Those Who Hunt and Those Who Resist.

The book’s story unfolds as Gina rejoins Cal Nichols, an immortal who has been walking the earth since he was brought out of the grave at Jesus’ crucifixion (read Matthew 27:52-53 for the account). Cal was once one of the Nistarim, a select group of men and women who carry the world’s burdens on their shoulders. If one of them slips before another can replace him, it will bring about Final Vengeance, the revenge of the evil Collectors, demonic spirits who once rebelled against God. Although Cal’s place among the Nistarim was lost when he fell into sin with the beautiful Nikki Lazarescu, he continues to fight the Collectors by finding and training those who are destined to join the Nistarim eventually — and by thwarting the plans of the Akeldama Cluster, a particularly nasty group of Collectors who are not just demonic, but undead. Raised from their own graves when the blood of Judas Iscariot fell upon them, the Akeldama Collectors are physical, immortal, and relentless in their pursuit of Final Vengeance.

Haunt of Jackals follows Cal and Gina, his unwitting daughter, as they seek to protect a child whose destiny lies with the Nistarim. At the same time, Cal is determined to find and destroy a particularly terrifying vampire, Natira, before he can carry out plans of his own. The book also spends a good amount of time in the heads and plans of the Undead, using the point of view of vampires, werewolves, and various possessed creatures.

Haunt’s plot is complex, taking us across the world from Romania to Oregon to the wasteland of Kerioth in Israel. It delves into the past, present, and future of Gina Lazarescu, exploring her heart as she attempts to overcome an abusive childhood and reconnect with her father, identify her own role in the fight against the Undead, heal the wounds of losing a child to death and a husband to divorce, and figure out whether or not she’s willing to put her faith in “the Nazarene” — Jesus, whose blood she wears in her jewelry as protection against the Akeldama Cluster and as the door to salvation if she ever decides to drink it. It delves into Cal’s life and past as well, with plenty of action scenes and drama. It takes us into the homes and hearts of the Undead and shows us horrifying things (some of them graphic and stomach-turning).

In all of this, “the Nazarene” is often mentioned, yet I found him strangely absent. And here is ultimately why I disliked Haunt of Jackals. In monster lore, superstition dictates that power lies in artifacts, and Wilson hasn’t particularly changed that. Gina kills an ancient vampire by using the knife that Peter wielded in Gethsemane. The Collectors can be dispatched by a metal tent peg driven through the temples of their host body.  To banish a Collector to the abyss, a drop of Christ’s blood will suffice — and all Gina needs to do to be saved is literally drink the same blood.

If Haunt of Jackals was an allegory, I could see value in all of this — but it’s not. It’s an adventure set in the real world, albeit with lots of speculative dimensions, and in this adventure, all you really need to defeat evil is the right artifacts, self-discipline, and good combat training. Cal declares at one point that “We battle not against flesh and blood,” yet his methods of battling are decidedly physical. Vampires are killed with blades, blood, and tent pegs, but never once is a demon vanquished by the power of Jesus’ name or by the power of faith in His blood.

It is here, not in the violence, sexual innuendo, and anti-established-church attitudes, that I felt Haunt of Jackals failed as a distinctively Christian voice in a subgenre saturated by occult ideas and superstitions.  The book upholds Christian morality and lauds the Nazarene as the Savior and head of Those Who Resist, yet the power and presence of Christ as the Bible reveals them to us seem replaced by the power and presence of Christ as the source of ritual, artifact, and victory in combat.

Laura Fabiani of the Library of Clean Reads posted her review of Worlds Unseen yesterday. Here’s my favourite paragraph:

From the onset, the author easily transported me to a medieval-like world, where I could feel the dampness of the fog at night, smell the earthiness of the underground tunnels, and hear the flapping wings and the eerie cawing of the black ravens enough to conjure images of Hitchcock’s The Birds. The imagery is captivating, and I was plunged into the scenes, walking with them through the dense, thick forest or running through musty, dark tunnels. The action is well paced and vivid as Maggie and Nicolas live through heart-stopping and heart-warming experiences together.

Laura had other good things to say, as well as some critiques.  Check out the review, and be sure to leave her a comment to let her know you’ve come by . She’s a terrific reviewer — I’d encourage you to take a look at some of her other reviews as well.

I received an e-mail from Rael, blog and book reader, when she finished reading Worlds Unseen a few days ago. It really encouraged me, so I thought I’d share part of it. If you’d like to read Worlds Unseen, it’s available for purchase or free download here.

Oh my goodness.  When you put Worlds Unseen on your site as a free download, you certainly knew what you were doing.    I am so hooked.  Now I need to decide if my budget can handle hard copies of it and Burning Light.  I definitely want these to keep, in tangible papery form!

Thank you for this story!  I am in rather a state of shock (the end-of-an-amazing-read sort of shock), and it might be a while before I can write a coherent review for my blog.  But for the moment, I mainly wanted to thank you for your well-told story of life and death and tears and growing up, of ashes and newness and the bright, starry thread, of monsters and scoundrels and everyday heroes stepping bravely into battle against evil.  Thank you for a picture of worlds unseen, of faith that hopes and believes when the night is dark.  Of a King who is coming.  Oh, I loved it!

To which I say, thank you . Readers like you are the reason I write and publish.

Tipper’s heart skipped a beat . . . “I have a feeling,” she said, “that we are going to have a glorious quest. This day is the beginning of a great adventure.”

So declares Tipper Schope, who gladly gives up the responsibility of caring for her family’s estate when her disappearing father reappears after fifteen years — well, mostly. He keeps flickering in and out, and his crotchety foreign companions declare a quest necessary: a search for three missing statues, sold off by Tipper to provide money for essentials, that must be joined to each other before Tipper’s father can stop coming apart and reassembling on a floorboard. Despite the heavy stakes — not only the life of Tipper’s father, but possibly the fate of the world, rests on the quest’s success — the journey begins with optimism, and it largely continues that way.

In The Vanishing Sculptor, billed as “a fantastic journey of discovery for all ages,” Donita K. Paul has created a lighthearted story in which not even tragedies can be too tragic. The world in which Tipper lives is simplistic (the villains look like villains; beautiful people always turn out to be good, even if they’re annoying at first), but imaginative and joyously visual. Paul’s dragons are delightful, her “grand birds” are endearingly grand, and the ramblings of confused or otherwise disconnected characters like Lady Peg and Wizard Fenworth are a constant source of locutionary entertainment. Thrown into it all is a missionary story, as Tipper’s father tries to share his newfound faith in Wulder with his skeptical daughter and their closest friend, the grand parrot Sir Beccaroon.

In short, The Vanishing Sculptor is a good tonic for stressful days and heavy hearts. It reminded me of some of Lloyd Alexander’s more upbeat adventures (think Vesper Holly, not Taran the Pigkeeper), with warm family ties and friendships, fights that aren’t too frightening, and lessons that go down easily. Though at times I found the prose choppy, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read from start to finish. In a genre which often relies on heavy themes and gathering darkness, that can’t be said about every book. It’s entirely true of this one.

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NOTE: I’d intended to post an interview with Mrs. Paul today, but it’s not in yet (she’s been rather busy, attending the ACFW Conference and winning an award for Mentor of the Year among other things), so I hope to post it tomorrow. If not, you can expect more ramblings from me of the usual kind on some theme connected to the book .

Of all the books I’ve edited, this year’s Wayback by Sam Batterman is one of my favourites. In my review of Wayback, I became one of many reviewers to compare Sam’s work to Michael Crichton’s, but this scientific time-travel thriller comes from a Creationist viewpoint.

I like to stop by Sam’s blog once in a while, and was pleased as punch this morning to see how well Wayback is doing. Jill Williamson (author of By Darkness Hid) gave it a four-star review, and there’s a fantastic picture of lots of Waybacks all lined up on a shelf.  (Check out Jill’s three-and-a-half-star review of my own Worlds Unseen here.) Sam also spills the beans on what he’s working on now — including a sequel! I’m so excited!

“Each sunrise seems to bring fresh reasons for fear.” In Fearless, the latest of many books by Max Lucado (the man is, I think, writing an entire library on the basic theme of God’s reality in the modern world), each chapter is an examination of fear—and of the reasons we needn’t give in to it. Lucado’s style is, as always, extremely accessible, packing ancient and life-changing truths into easy-to-read chapters.

Addressing fears from the deeply personal (“What if God isn’t real?” “What if I don’t matter?”) to the circumstantial (“What if the economy collapses completely?”), Lucado recognizes our fears, points us to Christ, and imparts courage in the message that ultimately, God is still here, is still real, is still in charge. Because these things are true, we can do as Jesus urged us and take courage.

Fearless is a simple book with a simple message, but that message is life-changing. Lucado calls our fears into the light, where God is waiting to meet them.

For information and interactivity (webcasts, Q&As) check out TheFearlessTimes.com.

I’m a member of Thomas Nelson’s Book Reviewer Blogger Program: http://brb.thomasnelson.com/