Child of a Mad God, by R.A. Salvatore is the first book in a series. It is fantasy. It is a braided narrative. It…is complex. Not so much the plot—Girl power coming of age—but the world is complex. Monsters, witches, magic, epic and sprawling lands, different cultures and traditions; all the stuff.
Basically, the reader follows two separate characters over 20 years. T—so many letters so we are going with initials on this one—is a young man who wanders the lands trading in small fishing villages along the coast of a large lake then back into the bigger kingdom. Honestly, he has a small role in this book and I got bored and started skimming his chapters.
Most of the book is about A, a magical girl from the violent and patriarchal mountain tribe that raids all the other villages and peoples on the lake shore and carries them off as slaves. She is an orphan who, under the tutelage of the woman the reader knows to be her aunt, must learn to quash her rebellious spirit and learn to use her talent for magic. This becomes more complex as she grows older.
Also there is a giant murderous, soul eating monster that runs around during a certain moon cycle.
Who recommended this book? Matt! Captain Matteo Thermopolis of the White Crane Philosophical Society. He actually recommended another book by the same author but this was the one that I could get for free on Thriftbooks. He didn’t mind. Matt is a martial artist who enjoys board games and always lets me open his fortune cookies and read the fortunes for him.
What did I think of the author? Salvatore built a comprehensive world rich in details. There was an element of ancient Britain vibe going on. His writing was balanced and I never felt like I was getting info dumped. I will absolutely pick up his books when I see them around. But also! He used probably twenty exclamation points per page!
What did I think of the book? It was fine. To be fair I am not a huge high fantasy reader but this was character driven enough that I kept turning the pages. I hands down preferred the A—story line to T’s. I’m sure that they run into each other again later in the series, but there was a huge page discrepancy so it felt like I was being pulled away from one story to get these interjections on the bigger world.
A starts off as a precocious three year old and ends the story in her early twenties. She has two things going on. 1. She is rebellious and doesn’t like the way her patriarchal society treats women or slaves. 2. She is magic and has a chance to become part of a coven that keeps the magic working for the tribe, if she can pass some tests and keep her personality in check.
A has two potential love interests: a power hungry warlord and an enslaved guy who has pretends to be cognitively impaired to escape an early death by his captors. We are supposed to root for the enslaved guy but he has little personality and is passive the entire book so I was team warlord who might be awful but at least he is striving for something.
The A storyline does a lot of perspective jumping which works to its benefit as the reader gets to see lots of information that the protagonist does not. This keeps the tension higher than it might have been otherwise. We also get to see characters die in consciousness rather than third person which seems rare these days.
Aside from the occasional passive character, the only real complaint I have about characterization is that A quickly becomes so magically powerful that nothing seems impossible. There are no flaws that temper her abilities so it doesn’t feel like she is ever in real danger.
World building is another matter.
In what society, ever, has a grossly overpowered group been happy to run down their mountain once a year, steal some slaves and a couple of human sacrifices and whatever booty they can haul away easily, then turn around and go back home for another year? Yet here we are. The tribe is shrinking, things are rough but hey, they don’t need to go get access to the rich and largely undefended lands by the lake?
Then there is the taking slaves part. They mountain folks think that pregnant women are the best captives because they bring the perfect slaves with them. This is a quote. The idea is that men might be competition, and boys have to be fairly young because they kill them after they hit puberty. Women are taken to be sex slaves and do menial work but also killed before they are unattractive. They aren’t allowed to have kids with the mountain people.
Now. How does any of that make sense in a logistical sense? You put 3-4 years minimum of food and care into a kid before they become even a little bit useful, meanwhile you lose workforce in caring for them. Then you get maybe a decade of service before tossing them into a pit? The author doesn’t really delve into the work enslaved or mountain women are doing—outside of making baskets and gathering food—but I am skeptical about the whole economy of labor the author has set up.
Speaking of rape. Holy non-consent Batman. Things don’t get terribly explicit but sexual violence is pretty prevent in this book. It isn’t gratuitous as everything plays into the plot, but still.
Salvatore writes a fantastic fight scene. This book truly shined in moments of action, and there was plenty of it.
The ending leads nicely into the next book in the series. There was no romantic resolution, though both character arcs felt like an opening to a new chapter. After I closed the back cover my reaction was “hmmm”. I had been entertained, but I don’t know that I felt intrigued enough about the characters to follow them through another 400+ pages.
Who would I recommend this book to? I am going to pass my copy to a couple friends, both who read mostly fantasy. The writing was good, but not transcendent to those who aren’t fans of the genre.
Violence? All the violence.
Sex? Lots of rape. Brief “And he took her there against the cliff” reference. Some insinuation.
Patriarchy? All the patriarchy. The rules of the mountain folk are reminiscent of fundamentalists.
Writing Prompt: Give an ordinary orphan some magical powers and see where it goes.
Mamasquatch the Writer 
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