The Burning Land

Disclaimer: I received an eARC of this book through netgalley in exchange for this review.

Victoria Strauss's The Burning Lands is book one of a two book series on what it means to have faith, influence the corse of humanity, and love. In this book we are introduced to two societies: one who harnesses the uses of Shaping (the magical system employed in this series) and allows those who own it to be free from restraint and another who carefully uses the Shapers to craft a religious tradition built with restraint.

In this book, we meet Brother Gyalo, a devout monk of the Âratist order from the second society. He has been charged with the honor of going out into sacred land to discover whether or not a secular group of Âratists survived the oppression of the Caryaxt who ruled his country for almost three generations.

His travels take him and his entourage deep into the Burning Lands, a vast desert that cannot sustain people well. Misfortune hits and Brother Gyalo is forced to use his powers of shaping to help him and a few of his crew survive, an act that causes his order to cast him out as an apostate. He arrives, along with 2 other survivors to a huge underground cavern where the secular Âratists live. As their beliefs forked off from the main branch for 3 generations, they aren't sure what to think of these outsiders. This is where we meet Axane, a girl who has the powers of Dreaming. She becomes entranced by Gyalo and his stories of the outside and declares her desire to help him escape.

The last part of the book returns Axane, Gyalo, and the others back to society where they are met with resistance and vitriol. Gyalo is banished as an apostate for having used his powers and in failing to bring the lost Âratists back to the modern ways, the Brethren take it upon themselves to destroy them themselves by using any means necessary.

This book is a triumph of storytelling, world building, and restraint of using magical powers. Yes, it's fantasy, but it has this strange undercurrent of what it really means to be alive, to be given gifts of miraculous powers, and which side of the fence is greener.

Bottom Line: If you enjoy epic fantasies with lots of world building that will have you questioning what it means to have faith, then Strauss's The Burning Lands is for you.

reviews.metaphorosis.com

3 stars

After eighty years of atheist government, the church of Arata is slowly recovering its traditional place. Talented and powerful young monk Gyalo is sent to investigate rumours of an uncontrolled community far across the desert Burning Land, only to uncover truths about himself and his world that shake the foundation of his faith.

I first encountered Strauss' writing many years ago via her Arm of the Stone books, which I enjoyed, and which brought me to this duology. I'm sorry to say that I enjoyed The Burning Land less on re-reading than memory suggested.

The Burning Land is fundamentally about faith and devotion - a thoughtful exploration of belief and temptation. It approaches the subject from an essentially religious viewpoint, examining the emotional impact of doubt on a true believer, without really questioning whether belief is valuable overall. The result is, like Christian rock music, interesting, but slightly alien.

Strauss draws heavily on Christianity in this story - there are clear parallels in the religious storyline, just as the atheist Caryaxist government is a thinly disguised proxy for a Communist regime. It feels like a setup for a heavy-handed Message - and yet there isn't really one. The book is surprisingly entertaining despite its leanings.

While the book is focused largely on analysis of the feelings of Gyalo and Axane, a young woman he meets, there's a distance between us and them that makes the experience tend more toward intellectual than emotional. Gyalo is unflinching in confronting challenges to his beliefs, but he largely stays within that belief system - considering issues of heresy and apostasy. He touches only tangentially on larger questions about whether faith is warranted at all, making the book less substantive and engaging than it could have been. Strauss does better with his emotional responses, which feel both genuine and intriguing. She keeps a strict focus on religious and story-present-day elements - there's clearly an interesting backstory about Gyalo's youth, but he himself barely considers it.

The book starts with a formal religious structure that frankly is not interesting until it fits into the structure of the story. You're best off skipping the prologue and coming back to it after reading a chapter or two. The mythic/religious structure is in fact interesting, but only in context. Despite the story's foundation in religion, and Gyalo's constant consideration of it, the ‘heresy' at the book's core never really hits home. We have to rely on Strauss' cues to know just how ‘odious' it is. Given that this tension is a linchpin of the plot, the detail seemed surprisingly unimportant.
 
The story takes place soon after great political struggles, but references to the past are clumsy. Unlike, for example, Tamar Siler Jones' books, set in the aftermath of great battles but focused on the present, Strauss spends quite a lot of time setting out past events that are mildly interesting but substantially slow the story's progress. In the first third of the book, it seems as if every chapter has a long pseudo-flashback or info dump that should have been trimmed and blended in instead.

All in all, an interesting an unusual-for-fantasy direct look at faith and belief. If the story doesn't delve as deep as it might, it's still interesting, and a fairly solid adventure romance besides.

NB: Received free copy from Net Galley.