Published Information
| Author: | L. E. Modesitt Jr. |
| Series: | The Spellsong Cycle #1 |
| Published: | Jan 1998 |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
| Pages: | 672 |
Plot Summary
Anna Marshal is a soprano from Iowa who is just passing her hay-day in opera singing and is slowly being pushed aside at the university where she teaches. Her life is not the best and she makes a wish that she were somewhere else. At that moment, a minor sorceress in a world called Erde is attempting to conjure a sorceress to help her in her world. Anna is the one that is magically summoned to Erde.
Erde is a world ruled by magic. And that magic is controlled by singing. When Anna arrives, many of the local rulers notice, through magical means, her appearance and recognize that she must be very powerful. As some of these leaders begin to approach her, either to garner her support or assasinate her, she realizes she needs to figure out how the magic works and develop her skills, or she will find her life ending sooner than expected. Once she understands her skills, she must decide who she will endorse and support, if any one... and how much she trusts them.
Comments
A couple of major themes in this book: power should only be held by those that don't want it, and sometimes the best intentions still cause problems.
On earth, she went through a messy divorce, dealt with politics in the university, and suffered through the death of one of her children. In essence, she has had to deal with a lot more that most should, and she has been toughened from the experience. When she arrives, because she is a woman, people treat her with disdain and as an object to be dismissed or mocked. In order to gain most people's respect, she has to resort to violence through magic. Though she is able to gain respect and support through force, she feels it shouldn't work that way. Throughout the book she works to change the culture where ever she can so that women, specifically, and anyone else that is in a lower class, are treated with equity and respect.
Additionally, she finds some of her changes cause unexpected problems. For example, at one point she uses magic to force a man to leave her alone by means of a spell that repels him anytime she is near. Unfortunately, he starts getting angry and takes out his anger on his wife for letting Anna stay with them. The point of the author, though, is not to avoid changes, but rather recognize that when changes occur there will be consequenses. Are the changes worth the consequenses? That is the question we should ask.
Overall, I enjoyed the plot. The plot was consistent and easy to follow, though a little predictable. One minor annoyance of mine was that the author used the first person present whenever someone other than the main character was running the storyline. For example, when the author showed us councils from the leaders looking for Anna, they would say things like "the speaker looks up and says 'Yo.' He thinks this is cool. He sits down" rather than the normal voice. Not a big deal but I didn't care for it.
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