Alma Alexander

Worldweavers — (2007-2009) Publisher: Thus says Cheveyo: mage, teacher, the first person in Thea's life to remain unimpressed by her lineage as Double Seventh, the seventh child of two seventh children. From birth, great things were expected of Thea, gradually replaced by puzzled disappointment as it became evident her magical abilities are, at most, minimal. Now, with Cheveyo, Thea has begun to weave herself a new magical identity, infused with elements of the original worlds where Cheveyo and others like him walk. But back home, she attends the Academy, the one school on earth for those who, like her, can't do magic. It is at the Academy that Thea realizes she will indeed have to fight, since her enemies are hungrier and more dangerous than she thought. What's more, her greatest strength may be the very powerlessness she has resisted for so long.

WorldWeavers (Gift of the Unmage & Spellspam)

Despite some rough spots, Alma Alexander’s Worldweavers series is an intriguing new entry in YA fantasy. At least based on the first two books in the series: Gift of the Unmage and Spellspam. The series is set in a world roughly akin and contemporaneous with our own, save that people can use magic and there are other “polities” such as dwarves, Alphiri and the Faele. Into this world a little over a decade ago is born with lots of fanfare and media coverage, Thea — the seventh child of a pair of seventh children — and from her are expected great things. Unfortunately, she seems to be completely bereft of magical ability and we enter Gift of the Unmage as she is given one last chance before her parents pack her off to the school for magical incompetents. Her father has pulled in lots of favors and arranged a mysterious tutor who turns out to be an Anasazi shaman (part of her father’s string-pulling included bargaining with the Alphiri — a highly mercantile race — to open a portal to the Anasazi time/dimension).

The entire first half of the book deals with Thea’s attempts to learn from Cheveyo and redeem herself in her father’s eyes especially. Both Thea and the reader are introduced to many southwestern Native American concepts in this section and it’s truly fascinating. Cheveyo is your typical stoic, stern, taciturn mentor, but while the character type is stock, the character is not and Alexander lends him a warmth and vitality beyond the clichéd. And while the “action” of this section is muted — no large magics, no black hordes, no monsters in the night, no dragons, etc.—the story is no less compelling thanks to the relationship Alexander develops first between Cheveyo and Thea and then between Thea and Grandmother Spider. The tension and conflict in this part deals not with armies, dark lords, or the usual fantasy tropes. It’s more interior and twofold: Thea’s fear of never being able to do magic and thus make her parents proud and living up to society’s expectations and her growing realization that the Alphiri have had a strange and seemingly unhealthy interest in her ever since her birth.

The second half of the book finds Thea sent off to that boarding school for magical incompetents (though things are not often what they seem in the series) where we’re introduced to a new setting and a new cast of secondary characters. Action starts to build more typically here as well, as we learn that the world is being threatened by a mysterious force that is killing people, including several of the school’s faculty who have been sent out to research and battle whatever it is. As one might expect, Thea and her friends (Magpie, a Pacific Northwestern Native American unable to perform her tribe’s ancestral magic; Ben, who sneezes uncontrollably whenever magic is around; and Tess and Terry, twins whose allergies to magic take the form of physical injury if touched or ingested (Tess) or spoken (Terry), play a major role in discovering and thwarting the threat.

To be honest, the two halves of the book are uneven in quality. The first half is mostly wonderful. The mythology is rich, the characterization full, the coming-of-age portrayed realistically and patiently, the tension while personal is compelling, the dialogue smoothly handled, and the physical detail sharp and vivid. The second half falters in many of the same areas the first half is so strong. None of Thea’s friends are drawn as sharply as Cheveyo or Grandmother Spider, the physical details are not as vivid, and the tension, while of the grander possible-end-of-life-as-we-know-it scale, is actually less compelling and its closure is relatively anti-climactic.

On a more basic level, the world-building is also not as strong. Despite its foreignness we feel much more on solid ground in the mystical worlds of Cheveyo and Grandmother Spider — they feel fully three-dimensional (or more). But the same isn’t true for Thea’s more modern world, despite its outward similarities to our own. It’s never quite clear how the society works, what the rules of magic in the world are, how the polities interact. There are references to various aspects, but nothing ever coalesces into a full and complete sense of a real world.

The second half, however, has its plusses as well. While the secondary characters never reach their full potential, one can see the opportunity for them to do so in the future based on what Alexander did with her earlier characters. Their interactions and dialogue all sound realistic — like these kids would speak rather than how many adults think they would speak. More Native American (Pacific Northwest this time) mythology is employed and, while not quite to the same effect as in the first half, it’s still a welcome breath of originality. And Thea’s newfound ability with computers — which up to this point had always been magically “inert”—melds the usual fantasy world of magic with the atypical world of computer technology. In fact, this “new” form of magic becomes the focus of book two, Spellspam, when someone learns how to send magical “spam” via email. At first the spam is merely prankish, but it soon grow more malicious and dangerous.

Like Gift of the Unmage, Spellspam is a bit uneven. Thea’s character remains fully formed and we continue to see her mature at a realistic pace, complete with self-doubt, mistakes, backsliding, regrets, etc. The side characters again vary in their depth, with several humorously, if quickly, drawn and others being a bit sketchy. The world-building problem remains and one hopes we start to get more details filled in about how this society works in book three. There is little of the richness of the Native American mythology in this book, and while one understands why Alexander couldn’t go to that well again, or at least, not as fully, it was such a strong aspect in book one that its absence makes itself felt here.

What does work is the complexity of the book’s final section, where Thea begins to more fully/directly confront the book’s villain. Up to this point, the email had been a necessary plot point but never really felt substantive; it lacked the heft, say, of the usual dark lord, encroaching army of demons, etc. The first half of book one made up for that with the internal conflict, but that wasn’t as strong here. But where book one faltered somewhat in its second half, Spellspam gets much, much stronger, attaining a richness, depth, and true emotional impact that close the book out strongly. And as with Gift of the Unmage, main plot points are resolved, but parallel ones are not, such as the Alphiri’s continued pursuit of Thea.

Worldweavers lacks the fullness of world creation that the great YA fantasies have, such as Leguin’s Earthsea or Alexander’s Prydain or Harry Potter (though I’d call HP good rather than great). And it doesn’t have the depth, say, of Pullman’s trilogy or the emotional impact of those or more slight fantasies such as Gregor the Overlander. But it does have a strong likeable central character, an original and intriguing mix of magic and technology, and a richly veined core of mythos. If she can put together a first half like book one and a second half like book two in the third of the series, she’ll have a true winner. Recommended. —Bill Capossere

Cybermage

Cybermage is Alma Alexander’s third book in the Worldweavers series and one that can satisfyingly close this particular series though I hesitate to ever use the word “concluding” with any fantasy trilogy as authors (or nervous publishers/agents) are wont to reopen allegedly “done” series.

Cybermage picks up just a little while after book two ended and while this book can stand on its own, with an independent storyline, it will make much more sense and be all the richer for having read the previous two (Gift of the Unmage and Spellspam), especially as there’s a larger story arc that runs through the entire trilogy — one that’s layered over each book’s own unique plot.

The first two books, as mentioned in my earlier reviews of each, were a bit uneven, but still well worth reading as their strengths outweighed their flaws. The same holds true for Cybermage.

One consistent strength is the main character, Thea, a fully-fleshed out character from the very start who continues to grow with each book. Too often, fantasy authors tend to equate “growth in power” with “growth of character.” But while Thea’s magical abilities do increase with each book, far more interesting is her personal growth — how she deals with her still-unfolding power, her changing interactions with her peers (who themselves are changing), how she deals with authority figures, and the way she responds to the moral implications of plot events. And these plot events do indeed have moral implications. And those moral repercussions, as they do in real life, linger. Many times characters may struggle at “the big moment,” but tune in 30 pages later and it’s often as if “the moment” never existed; the character has blithely moved on. Not here. Thea’s actions in book two reverberate throughout book three, having a direct impact on decisions she makes. Perhaps a more concise way of saying this is that Alexander has chosen to tell a story about a character who happens to use magic, rather than tell a magic story that happens to have a character in it.

Another major character in Cybermage is Tesla (yes, that Tesla), the only “quad-mage” the human world ever knew. Explaining how he goes from being in the past tense to being a major character would spoil things a bit, but he’s a worthy new addition to the overall storyline. So worthy in fact that I wish we’d seen more of him — his torment, his wildness, his tragedy. It’s all there and in more than sufficient form, but he’s so rich in potential it’s hard not to want more (though there’s the danger of him taking too much attention).

Other characters aren’t as strong as Thea and Tesla. We don’t spend as much time with them as in earlier books, or at least it seemed that way, and until the end they’re really more plot devices. That sounds worse that it is — we’ve seen enough of them before to accept them as full characters; it’s just that in this book they’re mostly just asked to move plot along — we don’t deal so much with their own interior struggles. Her friend Magpie, especially, could have done with more book time. We see her at the start as an example of the personality transformation that can strike adolescents and her sudden distance is one of Thea’s character subplots — both the subplot and Magpie probably deserved more time. Especially as Magpie has a major scene toward the end, one that has some power but could have had even more.

Along with character, Alexander’s willingness to explore darker aspects of story has been another plus throughout the series. There is some of that here — especially in the scene with Magpie above, but also in the two girls’ increasing separation, in Thea’s changing relationship with all her friends and with Humphrey (head of a sort of human security group), her increasing loss of innocence in her view of the world, her growing sense of isolation and difference even amidst “success,” and in some of Tesla’s storyline as well. It’s not quite as powerful here as in earlier books. We could have spent more time building up to some of it, or lingering over it, and some of the sacrifices get robbed a bit of their bite soon afterward (vague, I know, but I don’t want to spoil the plot).

One such sacrifice is robbed a bit of its potential impact because we don’t quite understand how the magic/magical world works, even after three books. We’re told in this particular instance that what the character gives up is a very big deal, but we never really feel it. The books lack that grounded sense of reality that worlds like LeGuin’s Earthsea and Harry Potter have, where we get a much better sense of how magic is incorporated into society. We get a nice little coffee shop scene here where we see a bit of nonchalant everyday magic — more of that sprinkled throughout the series would have gone a long way to giving us a better sense of where magic stood in relation to how people live. One feels the same way about the story’s “universe” in general which involves several other non-human races — we’re told enough to understand plot, to figure out tensions, but while we can intellectualize those moments, it would be better to feel them because we’re immersed in the created world.

The same is true though to a lesser extent with regard to Thea’s computer magic — we see what she does often enough, but we don’t get much of a sense of context. And at times it threatens to be too powerful, too easy, especially with the addition of a wrist computer at the start. This device edges at times uncomfortably close to a deus ex machina though, to her credit, Alexander pulls back in the nick of time at those moments.

The close of Cybermage, as has often been the case with the series, has some of the strongest moments and writing, though part of me wished she'd closed it down a few pages sooner (though maybe that’s just my preference for dark). It brings a definite sense of resolution to this book’s singular plot and a semi-resolution to the overarching storyline. Semi because while readers could be satisfied with where we stand at the end, it doesn’t close down the story of Thea. Mostly because Thea herself doesn’t close down as a character; she opens instead. I personally wouldn’t mind seeing more in this world — more of Thea, more of the other races — and my guess is that Alma Alexander will be receiving lots of fan emails/letters asking for just that. She’d get no objection from me. Recommended. —Bill Capossere