Book Review: How Zantheus Fell from the Sky

Title: How Zantheus Fell from the Sky 

Author: L.I.T.Tarassenko

Publisher: Kindle

Quote: "[I]t had not been a fire in front of him at all. What was in front of him was an enormous mirror."

Things that happen in this story are not necessarily physically possible: it's an allegory that works (sort of) on at least two levels, but as a fantasy novel it's not the kind that lets you believe that it could have happened in some other kind of world. Zantheus spends three days climbing up the mountain. When he gets there he sees an enormous mirror, feels that gigantic arms are throwing him down from the mountaintop, but lands unhurt and immediately starts walking back to town. Along the way he picks up companions.

They're not very believable as people, but neither is Zantheus. One of the metaphoric levels on which the story works is the reintegration of the personality. Zantheus is a "paragon of the knights" of an order who live in a "Sanctuary" below the mountain. As such he's brave, strong, disciplined, but a little bit robotic about how order's code of honor, having no personality to speak of. He meets Leukos, a young man who never stops writing, and Anthe, a woman who only feels and never thinks, and Tromo, a terrified little orphan who never speaks (funnily enough Zantheus is an orphan too), and Sophia, the woman Leukos is really following even as Leukos leads the group back to town. One of them will die in their many perilous adventures. The others will unite as a blended family, or integrated personality. 

They meet some people who are friendly and helpful: nice older couples who share food, sell them stuff to replace what they've lost, and guide them through the country through which thy travel back to their town; and people who are less helpful. Zantheus has to struggle with the bizarre hamartia plant (does everyone remember that hamartia means error?). They cross the city dump, where they see people who become addicted to the smoke of burning dyed leather. Zantheus beats up, and the others flee from, people who want to take them prisoner or kill them for no very clear reason. Then there's the pair of twin sisters who seem, when they meet them in the flesh, to be completely insane and fairly annoying, but then an image that looks like them is enshrined as the goddess at the Academy where friendly scholars insist that they stop and lecture...

The story of these people's adventure is not quite a novel, though it's about as close as some things that attempt to be novels in the fantasy genre. It's a statement about Society, and also a statement about which parts of the personality Zantheus needs to keep. If you want something light yet also philosophical to read on the bus, How Zantheus Fell from the Sky should last about a week.