Tale Of Manaeth

A college friend of mine mentioned on Facebook recently that he had written a book, so I offered to read it and give my opinion.

The book is the Tale of Manaeth.

From the webpage:

As the youngest girl in a family of six, Manaeth is an unlikely candidate for the throne of the Kingdom of Asylia. But when her entire family is murdered by agents of a cruel foreign king, she becomes the heir to the throne and the unexpected source of unity for her scattered and persecuted people. Though desiring peace she is forced to become a sovereign of war, and through fortitude and the shedding of much blood (and the supernatural assistance of a mysterious stag) she labors to free her people from foreign oppression.

Which sums up the plot and themes pretty accurately.

As for my opinion/review: If you would have read the Silmarillion even if you’d never heard of or read the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, and read it straight through, you may enjoy this historical-epic style tale of a kingdom (ahem, queendom) and its travails.

If you love the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid for their genre and form apart from their historical and literary significance, than this is the novella for you.

At 151 pages, this slim volume captures the flavor of ancient epic, without actually being ancient. The setting is fictional but has a classical flavor that will appeal to anyone who, upon completing the Aeneid, really wished Virgil had been bankrolled for a few more epics.

Personally, I prefer more naturalistic writing, even in my semi-classical tales – Until We Have Faces by CS Lewis comes to mind – and the author so successfully located the tale as a history of a specific fictional land and culture that I was somewhat alienated by the lack of applicability of the themes from the book to my own life. To tell the truth I would have a hard time telling you what the themes are (I had a similar problem with the Aeneid). Although the writing is stylistic, it is not particularly dry or difficult to read, and often rather lovely.

In the end, Tale of Manaeth is very successful at being what it attempts to be – a new contribution to the genre of historical-style epic – and I hope it may find its audience and give them as much pleasure in the reading as the author obviously found in the writing.