C.S. Lakin’s “The Sands of Ethryn”

A king thrown into a trance. A power-hungry vizier. An evil spirit awakening from a sleep of thousands of years. The discovery of what looks like a tall tower, buried in the desert sands. Archivists trying to deciphering ancient scrolls. Add them together, and you discover C.S. Lakin’s The Sands of Ethryn, the sixth novel in the Gates of Heaven series.

It may be well be the best one in the series so far, and that’s saying a lot.

The central idea behind the series is the concept of gates – that from ancient days, heaven had established seven gates to keep evil in the world at bay. Lakin has constructed a story around each of them. In The Sands of Ethryn, the city of Ethryn has developed near the established gate, but it is ailing: the city’s river is drying up, and families have begun to move away.

Nearby an archaeological dig is underway, and a remarkable discovery has been made – a tower, a very tall tower, just how tall no one can yet tell because it is buried in sand. Palace archivists are set to work searching ancient scrolls to find references to the tower and possibly translations of some of glyphs carved into the structure. Then the king of Ethryn visits the dig site to see an uncovered altar, and when he touches an altar gemstone, he falls into a deep trance.

This provides the opportunity for the king’s vizier to consolidate power. He has tapped into an ancient source of evil, one associated with the tower, and it takes over his human form. Standing against the evil are Hashubah, the king’s primary archivist and keeper of the library of scrolls; his granddaughter Ra’daf, who is a young scholar in her own right but limited because she’s prone to seizures and blackouts; and Avad, an archivist who has grown up with Ra’daf and secretly loves her.

As she has in some of the other books in the series, Lakin plays with the idea of time, that characters can slip through time or are suddenly forced to slip through. The king in his trance becomes a young man in a village, who is forced to become part of the massive slave labor gangs building the tower.

With the right mixture of action, suspense, and a little romance, Lakin has written a compelling story. She blends the Biblical account of the Tower of Babel with a work of her own imagination, and she explores how heaven operates outside human understandings of time.

The Sands of Ethryn is not a simple story; it must be closely read to catch all of what Lakin has packed into it. It is, however, a deeply satisfying story, rewarding that close reading.

Lakin was the author raised my interest inw hat fantasy writing can do. She has one book to go in the series. I can’t wait to see how she completes the stories of the gates.

Related: My reviews of the other Gates of Heaven novels:

The Wolf of Tebron

The Map Across Time

The Land of Darkness

The Unraveling of Wentwater

The Crystal Scepter

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

C.S. Lakin’s “The Crystal Scepter”

A frantic mother, facing the planned murder of her new baby by her husband (and the baby’s father), sends the child out to sea in a watertight cask. A fisherman finds the cask entangled in his nets, and believes he’s the replacement for the son who died. When the boy is 15, events force him to leave behind his father and the life he’s known to do battle with evil and – unknown to him – save his kingdom.

For from the beginning of C.S. Lakin’s The Crystal Scepter, we know what the boy, who’s name is Perthin Quay, does not – he is an heir to a kingdom.

For the past two years, C.S. Lakin has been publishing her Gates of Heaven series – and convincing me there’s a lot more to fantasy than I realized. She has created a world that’s familiar – but one that’s also very different than the reality we usually encounter in fiction (or life). These are wonderful stories, but they’re not written chronologically. Instead, Lakin is taking different aspects of this world she’s created and diving deeply into it.

The Crystal Scepter has all of the excitement of its predecessors in the series – dragons, sea serpents, a magic land buried under ice, an evil king and a desperate queen, and a young hero who does not seem to fit the role of hero, physically at least.

Lakin has utilized a number of Biblical and mythical themes. The story of Perthin, for example, includes both elements of the story of Moses and David. She also blends mythical stories as well, like the Gorgon or Medusa (the one who could turn you to stone if you looked at her face directly). A heavenly army merges to help Perthin when he faces what looks like the insurmountable forces arrayed against him.

Underlying the story and its sub-stories are the themes of grace and redemption, of using “the least of these” to accomplish great things, and the hidden royalty in all of us.

The Crystal Scepter is a rollicking good story.

Related

My reviews of the other Gates of Heaven novels:

The Wolf of Tebron

The Map Across Time

The Land of Darkness

The Unraveling of Wentwater

Pleasantly Disturbed Friday

It’s been a while since I gathered up my “notes to self” and Post-Its and what-not, and had a Pleasantly Disturbed Friday.

The picture above is none other than Roller (Caden) (because he likes to roll) and Cameron (Dancer) (because he likes to dance). Cameron, unbeknownst to his mother, was hiding in Caden’s pop-up bed. Mom got a real surprise, and Caden, who was supposed to have been sleeping, remained unflappable when Cameron yelled.

We had the opportunity to babysit them last Saturday. Grandpa had a ball.

I mentioned last weekend that we had seen Les Miserables, the movie. I still have the scenes and music running through my head. And I’m still amazed at the quality of the singing by actors I didn’t know could sing. A friend at work told me all of the songs were recorded live, on the set and not in a recording studio, which, if true, makes the singing all the more remarkable.

Current reading: Hurt, by Travis Thrasher, the final installment in the four-volume Solitary series. He’s managed to maintain and increase the momentum of this young-adult-but-older-adults-will-like-it-too story.

Next up on the reading list: an advanced reading copy of The Crystal Scepter by C.S. Lakin, another volume in the Gates of Heaven series. These are the books that helped convince me to read fantasy again. The book will be published Feb. 15.

And on the Can’t-Wait-to-Read List is Adam Blumer’s The Tenth Plague. Adam’s first book, Fatal Illusions, was one suspenseful read. His new one will published as an e-book next Tuesday. (Adam is the editor who slogged through both of my novels, and he did a wonderful job.)

My Novel News: My two novels have been getting some attention. Pastor Ron Edmondson of Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, called Dancing Priest one of the best descriptions of relationship evangelism he’d come across; I did a guest post for his blog on where the novel came from. And the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published a “Penned in St. Louis” about A Light Shining.

My Not-Novel News: It’s early in the process, but I’ve signed a contract with another publisher for a non-fiction book. I’m being deliberately vague; we’ve agreed on the idea and I’m working on a very extended outline, which will have to be accepted and then turned into a draft. If all goes well, it will be published late in 2013.

Finally, a picture of Roller (Caden) that I absolutely love. Taken by my daughter-in-law, it shows him peering around the corner of the sofa. Did I mention that I love having grandchildren?

C.S. Lakin’s “The Unraveling of Wentwater”

A child is born in the village of Wentwater, which seems soaked in superstition and old wives tales. At her naming ceremony, the local witch predicts the child will be the ruin of the village – and the women gathered together immediately drive the mother of the child away, set the house afire with the baby inside, and calmly go on about their day.

But the child doesn’t die; she is secretly rescued and taken to a place of safety, eventually landing in the arms of a childless couple in the Heights, the city in the mountains above Wentwater, where knowledge and reason rule. Years pass, the child comes of age, and is allowed to make a visit to Wentwater for the village festival. She meets a young man whom she falls in love with, and she meets the long forgotten prophecy.

And the prophecy still holds. The unraveling begins, and the young woman – named Teralyn – is at the center of it.

Welcome to the world of C.S. Lakin. Welcome to The Unraveling of Wentwater.

This is the fourth in the series entitled “The Gates of Heaven,” and there are three more to go. I should mention that this is the series of books that introduced and converted me to the fantasy genre. And this one is every bit as good as its predecessors.

Lakin has created a multi-faceted, extraordinarily detailed world. The reader gets the sense of life in medieval times, but this is a world where witches live in castles in swampy marshes and spirits occupy the lakes.

The novel has elements of familiar fairy tales – Sleeping Beauty, perhaps a dash of Snow White (sans dwarves) and Rapunzel (there’s even a short tower scene), to name two. But Lakin moves the story beyond the traditional fairy tale, and explores the contrast between knowledge and superstition, pitting village against town – and ultimately finding that both come up short. It is also a love story, and the story of what one is willing to sacrifice to save loved ones.

It’s a ripping good story.

The Unraveling of Wentwater will be officially published in July; I was provided an advance reading copy by the publisher.

My reviews of C.S. Lakin’s books:

Gates of Heaven Series:

The Wolf of Tebron

The Map Across Time

The Land of Darkness

Other Novels:

Conundrum and Innocent Little Crimes

Someone to Blame

"The Land of Darkness" Giveaway Winner

Yes, we have a winner in the giveaway of an autographed copy of C.S. Lakin's The Land of Darkness, the third of her novels in the Gates of Heaven series. (I thought there were to be five in the series, but it turns out there will be seven, which is all the better, in my opinion. I love these books.)

I used a very scientifically random process to select the winner.

First, you had to leave a comment on the giveaway post, citing your favorite favorite tale. (The favorites named were fairly diverse but certain words like Narnia and Lord of the Rings kept creeping in.)

The deadline was 6 p.m. Central time last night.

After the deadline passed, I numbered the comments in the order they were posted, wrote the numbers on slips of paper,  placed the slips in a hat, messed them all around with my hand, and then, with eyes closed, pulled one out. How more scientific can you get, right? Well, it was random, and fair.

And out of the hat came the slip numbered 3 -- Karen Kyle Ericson, a photographer who blogs under her own name. Congratulations, Karen! You are about to enter the Land of Darkness. Well, no, I didn't mean it that way. How about, you are about to enter the Gates of Heaven? Uh, no, that doesn't quite work either.

How about: you are about to receive one greatly enjoyable book to read, and you will likely go look for the others in the series already published -- The Wolf of Tebron and The Map Across Time.

Thanks to C.S. Lakin for providing the autographed copy.

"The Land of Darkness" -- A Giveaway

I can still remember being a young child and having my mother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me from a thin but oversized volume with a green cover. I still have the book, and am embarrassed to see that I also used it as a coloring book. But except for the Lord of the Rings novels (read first on college) and the Chronicles of Narnia (read first when my oldest was six), Grimm’s Fairy Tales were my only exposure to the genre of fantasy.

For some months now, I’ve been reading C.S. Lakin’s “Gates of Heaven” series – The Wolf of Tebron, The Map Across Time and The Land of Darkness. Officially they fall into the fantasy genre, but Lakin calls them fairy tales. I’m inclined to agree with her.

Fantasy is not the kind of fiction I usually read, but it is one, thanks to Lakin and Ian Thomas Curtis's The Canticles of Andurun: Dragonsong, that I’ve come to appreciate and enjoy. The sheer creativity of inventing an entire new world of characters, culture, geography and history is impressive, particularly when it’s done well. Lakin does it well. What I find particularly engaging in her novels is how she weaves the story of faith into the narrative in such a way as to make this new world familiar. And I’ve become a fan.

To introduce others to the “Gates of Heaven” novels, we’re doing a giveaway of an autographed copy of The Land of Darkness. The three novels are not consecutive; they can be read independently or in any order. They share geography, culture and history, but they are actually stand-alone novels as well.

To participate in the giveaway, all you have to do is leave a comment here with the title of your favorite fairy tale. That’s it. I like the “pull a number from a hat” approach and what I do is number the comments, place individual numbered slips of paper in a hat, and pull one out – about as random as you can get. But I think it will be fun to see what fairy tales people might cite.

To be eligible for the giveaway, leave your comment here by Friday, Dec. 2 at 6 p.m. Central time. I’ll pull the number from a hat and announce the winner here.

Even if you don’t win, I think you’ll find the entire series of the “Gates of Heaven” rewarding reading. I’m looking forward to the final two novels when they’re published in 2012.

Related:

My review of The Wolf of Tebron.

My review of The Map Across Time.

My review of The Land of Darkness.

C.S. Lakin's "The Land of Darkness"

 I’m becoming a real fan of fantasy.

C. S. Lakin has now published The Land of Darkness, her third novel in the “Gates of Heaven” series. The three stories stand as independent novels, linked by the world and geography Lakin has created and a fshared characters.

Somehow, the stories are getting better. And I really enjoyed the first two novels, The Wolf of Tebron and The Map Across Time.

Each of the novels are subtitled “fairy tales,” and this description becomes especially pointed in The Land of Darkness. The story has everything a (grown-up) kid could want – mysterious creatures, a quest, a story that never falters and even a wicked stepmother and two ugly stepsisters (yes, I know that’s politically incorrect, but that’s the story). And it’s all wonderful.

Jadiel, a 12-year-old girl, lives with her wealthy father and stepmother on a spacious farm. The stepmother is not what she seems, and finds way to bewitch the father while she steps up her mistreatment of and cruelty to Jadiel. After several unsuccessful attempts to kill the girl, the stepmother sends her off to find the leaves of the terebinth tree, which no one seems to have heard of. If Jadiel fails in her quest, the stepmother will kill her father.

Callen, a young man not much older than Jadiel, works for the girl’s aunt and uncle. He becomes interested in old parchment drawings of a bridge, with words inscribed in an unknown language and the drawing of a giant tree. He leaves for the capital city of Sherbourne (which was the major setting of The Map Across Time) – and finds himself rescuing Jadiel from kidnappers.

Together, Callen and Jadiel embark upon a quest, she to save her father and he to find the bridge. Eventually they are joined by an old, scarred guide named Ebed, who directs them forward both geographically and spiritually.

The reader comes to understand that whatever else The Land of Darkness is, it is the story of a spiritual quest, one that transcends the fantasy it’s set within to become something very recognizable – the meaning of faith.

It’s a delightful, enchanting story. Even with the wicked stepmother.

Related:

My review of The Wolf of Tebron.

My review of The Map Across Time.

Two by C.S. Lakin

Until recently, the only books by C.S. Lakin that I had read were a contemporary novel, Someone to Blame, and two of her fantasy novels – The Map Across Time and The Wolf of Tebron. She’s also written in a number of other genres. I just read two of her e-books this past week that would likely fall into the category of psychological suspense. The books are different – different stories, different themes and different plots. But they do have a number of things in common, including – interestingly enough – characters who struggle to become sympathetic.

Conundrum

In Conundrum, Lisa Sitteroff is watching her marriage fall apart, one brother increasingly bent on suicide, another brother who floats from job to job and relationship to relationship with a seeming dedication to making nothing last. And then there’s Ruth Sitteroff, their mother, who seems a character right out of Mommie Dearest.

Lisa’s father is dead, dying when she was a young child of what her mother describes as self-induced leukemia. It is Lisa’s father who sits at the heart of the story, as Lisa decides she wants to know the man who as her father. Her marriage falls apart and her husband leaves home; she and her mother have a major quarrel and falling out. And Lisa embarks on a journey, both physical and allegorical, to learn what she can about her father. And what she learns strips away both pretence and what has covered over lies and deceit.

Liss grows over the course of the book, She becomes more recognizable, more human and, gradually, more sympathetic and she unfolds the truth about her father, her mother and her brothers. The story ends well, but the reader stays tense getting there.

Innocent Little Crimes

Lila Carmichael has made it big (think Oprah-big) in television comedy. Her particular brand of comedy is rough, edgy, and often obscene. At the pinnacle of commercial success, she sends invitations for a weekend to her island getaway in the San Juan Islands near Seatlle to a group of old college friends, the group she worked with in the university’s theater.

It will be a weekend of reminiscences and revenge. And that’s the heart of Innocent Little Crimes.

For different reasons, all of the main characters are desperate enough to believe that Lila will be their lifeline and salvation. They, and Lila, are painted in extremely negative terms – it almost reaches the point where the reader wants revenge to wreaked upon the all, throw them over the cliff, and let’s go home. Two of the minor characters – the fiancé of Lila’s leading man in college and Lila’s gay assistant – provide the only relief from a cast of really rotten people.

As the story progresses, the reader learns what is motivating Lila, and what happened on the night that the university acting group staged William Inge’s “Picnic” that led years later to Lila’s revenge. (I need to note that the novel contains a few graphic scenes and strong language.)

The story is believable, but it is heavy. The reader knows from the beginning that one person is going to die, and Lakin keeps the guessing lively as to which one deserves it the most.

It is a dark tale.

Related:

My review of The Wolf of Tebron.

My review of The Map Across Time.

My review of Someone to Blame.

C.S. Lakin's "The Map Across Time"

I’m continuing my new-found romance with fantasy novels.

Last week, I talked about C.S. Lakin’s The Wolf of Tebron, the first novel in “The Gates of Heaven” series. The second book in that series is The Map Across Time, to be published March 4 (I read the Advance Reader Copy provided by the publisher).

The two books are independent of one another, sharing only an approximate time and place. Tebron is a small town, where a blacksmith named Joran has to confront an extraordinary quest. In The Map Across Time, the setting is the city of Sherbourne, but a city experienced by the same characters in widely separated periods of time.

Adin and Aletha are the teenaged children of the king of Sherbourne, who’s increasingly in the grip of increasingly evil advisors. Their mother is dead. Adin, the heir to the throne, has a number of physical deformities, and not one whom anyone would expect to undertake a quest. Yet it falls to Adin to save his father and the kingdom, by finding the source of the original curse that lies upon the city and is destroying his father.

And he does that through a map, a special map, a map that takes him across time. Aletha follows, by following Adin's glittering path through the woods. They don’t arrive together; in fact, Adin won’t learn for some time that Aletha is even there.

Lakin tells a wonderful story, full of creativity and imagination and even more unexpected twists and turns than the first novel in the series. And it’s a riveting read, complicated by Aletha falling in love in the wrong period of time; special wizards and seers; evil disguised and exposed; a talking pig who’s absolutely delightful; and nothing being what it appears to be. Lakin controls this story, and does it well; it never flies out of control but keeps to a complete center.

The central figure is Adin, the bearer of infirmities and the bearer of the quest. He’s an unlikely candidate to be chosen to do what must be done, not to mention accomplish it, but he accepts the quest and changes his life and the lives of those he loves, and his kingdom. Lakin draws him well and true, because she draws his heart well and true.

It’s a fine story, an engaging story, one that I had a hard time putting down. It’s suitable for older children, young adults and adults, and even for reading to younger children.

The only drawback is that I have to wait until October to read the next novel in the series.

C.S. Lakin's "The Wolf of Tebron"

I've never been a fan of the fiction genre of fantasy.

Back in the mid-1970s, possibly because of the release of Star Wars in 1977, I went on a binge of reading science fiction: Robert Silverberg, Orson Scott Card, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert (the Dune novels) and a lot of others. I enjoyed them, but I eventually lost interest and returned to mystery and contemporary fiction.

I was never really interested in fantasy, although the seeds were certainly sown by reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in college and again right after college, and then rereading them shortly before the first Peter Jackson movie epic in 2001. And in both the 1980s and early 1990s, I read the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis to both my children (born eight years apart so that’s why the gap in reading).

A few months back, I reviewed C.S. Lakin’s Someone to Blame, a contemporary novel I really enjoyed. She contacted me, and asked if I’d be interested in an Advance Reader Copy of her next work, a fantasy novel called A Map Across Time. Oh, I thought to myself, a fantasy novel. I don’t read fantasy. But I said yes, and in due course the copy arrived from the publisher. (It’s to be published March 4.) It’s the second in Lakin’s Gates of Heaven Series.

I was so impressed with the book that I ordered the first in the series, The Wolf of Tebron. Fortunately, the two novels are not dependent upon each other, linked only by an approximate time and place. Both books are subtitled “a fairy tale.”

I hope I can do justice to these books. They are that good.

In The Wolf of Tebron, Joran, a young blacksmith with a history he’s unaware of, sees his wife Charris in the close and mutual embrace of a neighbor. He’s so angry that he sends her away, back to her family in another town.

She never arrives. Then Joran’s nightmares begin, haunting his sleep with images of Charris trapped behind a window of ice. And then an odd local resident called the Goose Woman tells him he’s trapped his wife in a dream, and three keys must be unloosed to free her. But time is running out.

Joran, alone of his family, has the ability to speak (or mind-speak) to animals. As he struggles with whether or not to believe the Goose Woman, he meets a wolf named Ruyar whose paw is caught in a trap. Ruyar will accompany Joran on the quest to save Charris.

What follows is an extraordinary journey to the House of the Moon, the Palace of the Sun and the cave of the South Wind. The journey becomes a kind of pilgrim’s progress, as Joran learns from each new experience and from the direct teaching of Ruyar and his “wisdom of the wolves.”

To say more would give the story away, and it’s simply too good to be spoiled like that. But it reads so right, so true, that the reader eventually comes to understand that this is a story of both salvation and redemption for all of the characters. It is not only Charris who needs rescue.

The Wolf of Tebron is a wonderful story, richly imagined within a world that is both recognizable and yet otherworldly. It can be read by adults, by young adults, and even to older children. Lakin has created a fascinating story, and she just might turn me into a fan of fairy tales after all.

Next Friday: The Map Across Time.

C.S. Lakin's "Someone to Blame"

Matt and Irene Moore and their daughter Casey move to Breakers, a small summer-tourist kind of town in northern California. A family whose faith has been almost wrecked, they are trying to leave behind them a family tragedy – the accidental death of their youngest son, and the suicide of their oldest son. Their new town is not an escape; instead, it will be where all three of the Moores have to come to grips with what happened and what lies ahead. And the catalyst will be Billy Thurber, a drifter-type who always seems to be up to no good.

Then thefts, fires, break-ins and property damage start happening, and the town suspects Billy is the culprit.

Someone to Blame by C.S. Lakin explores a number of themes and ideas: how we attach blame because of our own fears, losses, and tragedies; how we can reach a point where we can rationalize violence; how we form impressions and make judgments of others because of appearance and attitude; and how we feed our own prejudices.

Lakin moves the story through a number of different points-of-view: Irene Moore and her husband Matt; their daughter Casey; Sheriff Huff; Jerry Hubble the embittered, alcoholic owner of a motel; an elderly couple who operate a small hardware shop; the owner of the bait shop; and others. All of them see Billy Thurber through different yet not necessarily conflicting eyes. The one character who doesn’t tell much of the story directly is Billy, and he may well be the most intriguing (and important) character in the novel.

There is some emphasis on the importance of faith but it’s not overpowering. The local pastor plays a relatively minor role, mostly to offer comforting words to Irene, although he’s part of a rather short but tantalizing scene involving candles being lit in the church by person or persons unknown.

Someone to Blame is an ambitious novel, and largely succeeds at what it sets out to do – examine why we are often so desperate to assign blame for failings that are often our own.