Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

SUSAN FAW – SEER OF SOULS – BOOK 1 – ON THE SPIRIT SHIELD SAGA – 2016

This novel has a magical feel and taste that makes it appealing I guess to young people who still have some imagination and can still accept the world is not only what they have been told at school or on television. The world has secret passages, dungeons at times very deep under beautiful chateaux and mansions. Appearances may have to be kept but they are only appearances and nothing else, and Mrs. Bouquet is nothing but a Mrs. Bucket. Reality is always deeper. The author works on that depth in different directions.

First there is the depth of beyond the borders, of the foreign country over there where people are different in a way or another, darker or of a different religion. They are called Primordials and as such have a dimension that is slightly magic. The next dimension of this depth is to make the Prince of the kingdom in which the action takes place fall in love with a Primordial Princess and they get married and have twins, but before or at the time when the twins are born another depth appears: the sister of the king eliminates her own brother to seize power and become an absolute and violent monarch that is going to start or multiply the conflict with Primordials to the death if possible.

But Susan Faw wants to dig deeper and she makes the world of gods and goddesses a very contradictory world with a dark goddess behind the murderous sister and a goddess of light behind the twins, a boy and a girl who are now in the present of this novel a man and a woman, about 17 years old. The union of a man from here and a woman from over there produce a supernatural couple that are entrusted with the possibility to communicate and protect the souls of dead people who are waiting to be reincarnated again.

And go farther again and have wizards behind that young man, Cayden, the new king and that wizard, and there will soon be more, is able to help the young man to recapture his throne and to reunite his people. Unity in a country is not imposed by force but must be emerging from the people themselves when the proper incitation is provided by the proper leader.

That’s where I have a reserve. I do not see why the new king has to be a king and the evil queen has to be a queen. When you cut the vision of the world in two, with good on one side and evil on the other side, since there are only two sexes, you have to choose which sex is evil and which sex is good. Women are kept in secondary position too much and what’s more the only evil leader is a woman. The Charuns are understood as being male for sure but they are serving the evil queen. And around Cayden, you have a lot of men and only two female characters, one Primordial Seeker and one female wolf, plus his sister that has been taken away from the action.

Yet you will like the novel because it is positive since evil forces are defeated, because they are not evil enough: they kept one wizard alive and they do not execute Cayden as soon as they realize he is dangerous: even if he were not the son of the late king, to assassinate him would not have been that bad a crime among the thousands of other crimes they committed. And why on earth did they keep the King’s guards alive even if they banned them from the capital city? It is obvious if they had been evil to the highest level possible, it would have been difficult to bring the evil queen down since there would have been no one to oppose her. So that evil queen is not that evil after all.

That’s just what makes this novel fit to young people or old teenagers. Boys or girls alike, though women are in a rather secondary position. I like the female wolf particularly. A good idea.

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU