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WoGF Review: The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer
Brett Ellis (Brett72): My interest in reading was spurred by my father reading to me before bed when I was a boy. I developed my reading skills because I wanted to know what happened next and the nightly sessions were too slow. My parents took me to see “Star Wars” when I was five and I’ve been hooked on sci-fi and fantasy ever since. Yes, I am part of that generation for whom “Star Wars” was a life-shaping experience. When not reading far too many “Warhammer” novels, I enjoy miniature wargaming and action flicks.
I love sword and sorcery. Robert E. Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock… well, you get the idea. Based on her debut novel, Courtney Schafer may very well belong in that esteemed pantheon. In other words, I heartily enjoyed The Whitefire Crossing.
The city of Ninavel lies atop a large magical confluence in the middle of a desert. In exchange for free reign to practice their craft as they please, including dark arts forbidden elsewhere, mages swear loyalty to Lord Sechaveh and use their powers to provide the city with water. The common people of Ninavel live in fear of the sorcerers, but dream of earning a share of the riches that flow to the city.
Dev is one of those people. He earns his legitimate living as an outrider on the merchant caravans that cross the Whitefire mountains to reach Ninavel. He makes his illegitimate living smuggling magical charms into the country of Alathia, where all magic not directly controlled by the government is forbidden.
WoGF Review: The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer
Sue Bricknell (SueCCCP) is an ex-pat Brit living in Maine. She has no real memory of learning to read and has always had a great love of fantasy. She blames this on her early introduction to the Tales of Beatrix Potter, which she had memorized by the age of four. From an early obsession with Fantasy she has expanded her interests into the Science Fiction, Mystery, Horror and Crime genres. Joining a local book group made her realize that she really likes talking about books, so she began her blog, Coffee, Cookies and Chili Peppers. She has recently had the good fortune to be hired as an assistant librarian, so now she can think about books even more!
I had not realized that landscape would play such a large role in The Whitefire Crossing, but it was a pleasant surprise and spoke to the same love of nature that I find in Tolkien‘s work, amongst others. The author, Courtney Schafer, spends a great deal of time climbing and it shines through in her writing. She conveys the environment with great skill and also captures the emotions that can be provoked by pitting oneself against a natural challenge. I appreciated her knowledge of climbing and its techniques and yet I did not feel as if I was becoming bogged down by details and long-winded explanations of how to tie a specific knot correctly. I felt that she was very successful in giving us just enough detail to make us able to get inside Dev’s mind so that we could understand how he uses climbing as a sort of meditation.
As well as providing a good backdrop to this fantasy world, I felt that the practical details of the journey helped to both enrich Dev’s character and provide us with a sense of the time taken to travel. So often traveling is done with a sentence or two and we do not feel the hardships that it involves, and yet here we’re given the time to get to know our characters whilst they are placed in jeopardy of a real and physical nature. They also had time to learn about each other and to bond by overcoming adversity in the simplest of ways as they travel through the mountains. This meant that we could explore their initial distrust so that their actions were completely understandable and their ultimate decisions to trust one another were much more poignant and satisfying. It is strange how the decision to linger over the practicalities of travel allowed this to become so much more character-focused than I had expected.
WoGF Review: The Whitefire Crossing by Courtney Schafer
Carrie Naughton (Bookkeeper) is a book writer who moonlights as a bookkeeper even though she’s mostly a book reader. She likes to eat breakfast for every meal, drives a purple car, and listens to Roger Waters almost exclusively during tax season.
Even though this is a woman-thang reading challenge, I seem to be on a bro-mance roMANce kick lately, witness my lovefest WOGF review of Luck in the Shadows from last month. This month it’s no different, though I didn’t intend to continue the trend. I got The Whitefire Crossing as a free Barnes & Noble download, thinking I’d probably never read it because I already have at least 90 books in my nook library. And yet – I started in on Courtney Schafer‘s novel while on the treadmill at the gym, and I didn’t quit (I mean, I quit the treadmill after my usual 3 miles, puh-leeze, but I kept reading the book later at home).
Unlike Luck in the Shadows, there’s no gay love story here, but this is still a tale about the origins of a partnership and a friendship (this is the first book in a trilogy) that two men are both in desperate need of, whether they realize it or not. In the fantasy kingdom of Ninavel, Dev is an outrider, a sort of mountain guide-slash-smuggler, between the two magical realms of Alathia and Ninavel, divided by the Whitefire mountain range. He takes a business deal to lead Kiran over the treacherous mountain passes to Alathia with a cargo convoy, assuming that Kiran is just a rich, inexperienced boy, when in actuality the boy is a blood mage with some serious issues, on the run from his scary mage-daddy Ruslan. Though Dev and Kiran come from very different backgrounds, both characters have backstories fraught with childhood abuse and tragedy, both have been influenced by magic, and both have hidden agendas, making them more alike than either of them know.
