Book Review: The Merchant's Son

Title: The Merchant's Son 

Author: Wade Lewellyn-Hughes

Date: 2021

Publisher: Wisdom Wonder & Whimsy

ISBN: 978-1-976513-97-7

Quote:  "Young Master Fuchs. That's what all the servants called him...in his father's company."

Despite his prematurely grey hair, Teague Fuchs is a young man, still defining his identity as distinct from his father's, resentful of his father for that reason. On page one we find him in the "naked embrace" of one of Daddy's connections' adult children. This time it's a female, but sometimes it's male. He jumps out of bed, drawing the bed-curtains together to conceal the woman, to receive a message. He tells his bedmate it's about his wife having killed his "mistress," but he doesn't have a wife and the message is actually from an unexplained acquaintance, Elanis, who turns out to be a fellow student of wizardry only much more competent at it, who is a lesbian...

This seems to be terribly important in the "Lamentation's End Series" to which this short novel is an introduction. We don't know how the odds and ends of Eurasian folklore that make up this fictive world have come together, or why, but we will be told about everybody's sexual kinks, even though the characters are summoned together as a test for a magical quest--the test consisting of challenges and adventures--that seems physical enough to take their minds off the said kinks. 

If an author and editor don't have the wisdom to know what fantasy readers prefer to be left to wonder about, that places this book in the publishers' "whimsy" category. The story--your basic story of the young protagonist getting acquainted with colleagues, doing tasks that establish his fitness for a job, feeling more mature and less resentful of his parents' adult status at the end--might deserve four stars for whimsical imagination if it had clarified what this fictive world is all about instead of tailing off, pun intended, into the "sexual identities" garbage that does not belong in this kind of fantasy. A lot of people and creatures in magical worlds have always been described in ways that don't leave much room for the standard reproductive process of warm-blooded Earth creatures. If there's only one of a creature in the world and it lays one fertile egg that hatches out of a fire that consumes the nest and the parent bird, obviously it doesn't mate in the usual way. But fantasy readers have traditionally preferred to keep any speculation about what else such a bird may do with its energy off the pages.

We cannot all be Tolkien but, if you like fantasy and don't mind a bit of unnecessary smut, you might enjoy The Merchant's Son and its sequels...so it's my painful duty to inform you that my review copy arrived in the e-mail with spam content. The spam seems to have been easy to sweep away but it did pop into my in-box. I don't want to encourage that so I'd say, definitely, wait for the printed edition.