"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 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.