Book Review: The Power of Destiny

Gentle Readers, I'm feeling overwhelmed. I need your help. 

It's not just that about 300 books came in during the Booktober Blitz...and most of them are worth reading, at least once, and recommending, at least to fans of their genres. So far I've uploaded only one "book" that seemed like a waste of the time it took to download, upload, and read. (It shall be nameless.) 

It's that the 250 writers of those 300 books all added my name to lists and are now sending me weekly e-mails about their other books, and their friends' books, all of which they want read and reviewed this year to determine which of all these free or cheap e-books deserve to be printed in hardcover editions and kept in libraries.

Your favorite book bloggers have only the two eyes apiece. We can read only so many of all these books. Youall need to get onto some of these lists and read and review some books, too. 

It costs only your time; you can always get off the lists. My e-mail is all too eager to reclassify all the e-mail lists as spam, but they're not. They are bacon. 

The fact that you're reading for pleasure, in English, on a computer, shows that you're part of a global elite group (whether you feel like it or not), so please be a good privileged elite group and read some new free short e-books that are available through Kindle or Book Funnel or similar. 

Last year I was trying to read books in the order they came in. That would have been fair and reasonable, and should have worked, but it didn't. E-books open in one (or sometimes more) of three apps on this laptop: Edge, Kindle, or Book Funnel; I find myself reading through what's stored in each window, in the order those books came in, and then moving to the next. In a similar way I find myself dropping batches of reviews on Goodreads, Library Thing, and Net Galley.

The largest number of Booktober books came into Book Funnel, so I was there when the Long And Short Reviews prompt came up: "Criticize your favorite book."

I have criticized a few lifelong favorites--books by Wendell Berry, Suzette Haden Elgin, Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, C.S. Lewis, Kathleen Norris, Emily Dickinson, other writers I try not to sound totally fangirly about--in other years. This is the year of the COVID-driven book launch. It seems appropriate to review my favorite book from the Book Funnel batch, so far. It's fantasy, and it's long, and I received volume three ahead of volumes one and two, but enough serious thought went into the "Force of Magic" trilogy to be worth adults' attentive reading.

Title: The Power of Destiny (volume 3 in the Force of Magic trilogy)

Author: Hunter Chadwick

Date: 2023

Publisher: Clarity & Truth Press

ISBN: 9798850890568

Quote: "The Brotherhood was no longer attacking, but held back as their eyes filled with fear."

If you like a story that dives right into the action, you will like this fantasy novel. It starts with a generic war between what will turn out to be right and wrong, but aren't easy to sort out at first--low-tech warriors hacking each other up and occasionally using magic to speed up the bloodshed. But that's not what's going on. On page one, magic has just taken out Perin, a "little girl" whose magic powers have kept her on the battlefield saving her warrior protectors. That's what's distracting the "Brotherhood" of enemies. As the story goes on, we see that, while the warriors will be brave and do their best, the war will be won by non-combatants, with non-violence, forgiveness, freedom from prejudice, and sacrificial love. Trace, the first point-of-view character, has been bravely protecting Perin but she'll soon be protecting him.

What they're fighting about turns out to be a fantasy-fiction analogy to today's transhumanism. The evil Brotherhood have forced members of an undefined Guild to swallow an Elixir of Life, which only a few of them have dared to try for themselves. The Elixir knocks everyone out at first. Many who swallow it never wake up. Others wake up with magical power. The magic user who has removed Perin from the battlefield feels called to commandeer Perin's power, along with her own, to discover the Source of this new wild magic. 

Perin is growing up, and this story is something we don't see often enough: a story about a girl actually growing up before she "falls in love." In this action/adventure story Perin will lose friends, willingly give up friends, sacrifice for friends, and--with a lot of help from her friends--basically save her fictive world.

It took a while for me to figure out that something was going on in this book beyond the generic slash-and-bash war. Because I know Hunter Chadwick to be a serious thinker and writer, I persisted, and I'm glad I did. The thought and craftsmanship that went into this off-brand fantasy are extraordinary. The big commercial publishers rarely find a story as good as this one. The dragon character is a different species from Ursula K. LeGuin's, Anne McCaffrey's, or J.R.R. Tolkien's, but can stand beside any of those. 

I'm not altogether sure about the implications of Chadwick's use of the metaphor, but his story is certainly a good read. I would like to see the perils of transhumanist technology overcome by love.