I don’t know, I just don’t know about this book. On one hand, I know it’s not my kind of book, yet on the other, it was very, very interesting! I will tell anyone reading this review up front that this is a very violent book, at least for a couple of scenes. There is a lot of action during the course of the book and it is exciting, but the author can get very graphic, very quickly.
This is a story about a young man going to school to find out what he wants to become, if they will let him. And I will also state very clearly, that this is in no way, a Harry Potter© type story; far from it. Ceril (and yes,my keyboard does want to spell Cereal), is our main guy. He’s been working with his Grandpa for most of this summer and for probably a lot of summers past. It doesn’t say anything about Ceril’s parents, just that he’s been working in his Grandpa’s garden a lot and they both enjoy doing that. This sounds like a pretty peaceful setting. It is until Ceril finds a sword in the garden.
Yes, Ceril found a real special kind of sword which his Grandpa promptly took away from him and never said anything about it again. Ceril heads back to school again and is ready to start another usual fall term only this year he thinks he’s going to get to pick his special field of study. He believes he want to study agriculture in order to go back to his Grandpa’s garden and help make it produce more. Now all this sounds pretty boring and it did to me, expect when that sword starts showing up either at Ceril’s feet or in his hand! It just appears! Ceril isn’t sure why or what is happening, but he has this sword that glows like crazy and he is becoming the attention of lots of professors and even the Head Master.
He’s quickly told that he won’t be studying agriculture, that’s for sure. He sword has shown him to be a budding technomage and that’s what he’s going to be one way or another. And then to top it off, Ceril accidentally kills a student when the sword appears in both his hand and the chest of a rather large and intimidating student!
It definitely is interesting reading to find out what happens to Ceril over the next six years. He’s not actually at the school any more but he is studying. He has to find out how to control the sword through a lot of training and then he has to study just how this sword and others like it came to be. It’s not magic, but darn near like magic. If you listen closely to todays news, you’ll hear stories about tiny little machines that are now being built to do things for which they are programmed. These are called Nanites and Ceril and his world have tons of them.
Again, not my kind of book, but it really, really is a lot of science fiction. I might just even read the second book, “Lineage”, that’s already published! It’s a good to great story.