New author for me time, with Daniel Abraham being today best known as one half of the duo who write under the pen name James S. A. Corey and are responsible for The Expanse series. I’ve never read that either but I love the televisions series. This novel was his debut and was recommended by many, being the first book of a quartet. Unfortunately while the world he creates here is indeed intriguing, I ended up not really liking this novel and I doubt I’ll read the rest of the series.

In the part of the world where this novel is set, the city states of the Khai enjoy wealth beyond measure due to being natural centers of trade. Though they have no military to speak of, they do command the power of the Andat, spirits who have been bound by poet-sorcerers and who seem to have near absolute power within their domain. In the city of Saraykeht, the poet in residence is the depressed Heshai who controls the Andat Seedless, capable of removing the seeds from crops and hence save a great deal of labour. However the more war-like Galt plot against the city using their agent the merchant Marchat Wilsin. Into this intrigue is embroiled also the poet’s new apprentice, House Wilsin’s business manager in the city Amat, her own apprentice Liat and Liat’s lover, the lowly labourer Itani. But Itani is more than he appears to be and Amat is too intelligent, too moral and too loyal to Saraykeht to be used as a pawn in this scheme. Most of all, the Andat hate being bound and Seedless in particular despises the poet who controls him.

As I said, the world is intriguing especially with the concept of the sorcerers being poets. In their free, natural state, the Andat are formless and only loosely defined, and the act of binding itself gives them a concrete existence that the poets must spell out with exacting precision. Seedless’ power seems underwhelming at first but then they point out that it applies to every living creature and the implications are frightening. It seems that in the past Andats with more overt and spectacular powers were bound, but each time an Andat gets free, they can never be bound in the same way again and so it becomes an ever more difficult task. This explains why the power of the Khai are on the decline and why their enemies are on the prowl though they are not yet ready to start an open conflict. As such, there is surprisingly little outright violence in this book but there is plenty of skullduggery and deceit.

Yet while I can perceive what the author is trying to do, I don’t agree that he is entirely successful. He needed to work harder to drop in bits of lore about the wider world, such as examples of what other Andats are capable of and get across a better sense of the balance of power. A good example of the kind of flavor that I think the author is going for might be JY Yung’s The Black Tides of Heaven but as it is, Abraham’s prose simply isn’t evocative enough. Perhaps he might have shown us an actual scene of an Andat being bound, or an example of what a binding actually is like, rendered imperfectly in human language, or what poet training actually entails once they have passed what amounts to an extended test of character. We are also given very little information on the nature of the Andat once bound. Can he be killed or hurt? Does he have to eat? Can he exercise his powers at unlimited range? We don’t know. At the same time, the conspiracy that is at the heart of the main plot seems rather simple. Once it’s all laid out, that’s it without any of the expected twists and later developments. I really don’t understand why Heshai and Seedless are given so much freedom to wander at will when they are really strategic weapons. At the very least, I would expect extensive surveillance and security on both of them at all times. But that would have nixed the conspiracy before it was hatched.

Finally, my biggest issue may be that the author’s choice of protagonist seems to be a grave mistake. To be fair, there are multiple point of view characters in this book but beginning with the prologue, the narrative leads us to expect exceptional things from Itani and I understand that he is indeed the main character for the rest of the series. Yet this implicit promise is unfulfilled as Itani is the character with the least agency and almost everything that he does here turns out not to matter much at all. The person with the most agency is actually Amat who notices that her employer is doing something shady, takes action to find out what is going on and later has to suffer the consequences of doing so. I find the chapters about her to be consistently the most interesting as the others are younger characters who are mostly concerned about their love affairs. It really is quite remarkable how much of the novel is devoted to passionate and then frustrated love. I also found it unbelievable how the poet’s apprentice holds Itani in such high regard due to an encounter during childhood and this respect for his competence and virtue doesn’t seem justified by his actions as an adult at all.

People keep saying that this is an ambitious debut novel and it’s true in how it tries to go on a completely different direction than most other fantasy stories. But it seems to me that the author didn’t quite have the writing skill and worldbuilding preparing at the time to really pull off what he wanted to do. Even if the series gets better later, and many do, this feels a lot to me like it’s just setting up Itani to be some major figure down the road but doesn’t show him doing anything much here. I don’t think I’ll be picking the rest of the series up especially as it doesn’t seem as if Ama will be a major figure in it.