"The Heir Chronicles" - YA Fantasy Series
Book Series Review
Many Young Adult Fantasy novels follow a well-known formula: Young boy/girl, usually having lost a father or mother or both, seems to change places very frequently, having difficulty merging into the society around him/her, discovers that he/she has a skill or magical power or is the descendant of an ancient hero etc. Cinda Williams Chima follows a similar formula in The Warrior Heir.
Jack Swift is living in a small Ohio town named Trinity. He has a scar above his heart and he has to take medicine once a day to make sure he does not have any complications due to surgery he had when he was a baby. One day he misses his daily medicine and finds out that he is much more powerful than he normally is. He finds out that he is one of the Weirlind, part of a society of magical people who live hidden among us. There are different categories of skills among them. Jack is a Warrior, there are Wizards who are the dominant kind among the Weirlind, Sorcerers who can prepare magical potions and other types of charms and other types of magicians. Most of them have a stone embedded in their heart, giving them the power. The dominant class is the Wizard and they have reached a Covenant in order to limit the power struggle between the different types of Weirlind. Instead of fighting among ourselves, they use Warriors in a Tournament. Wizards raise or find Warriors and let them fight each other in tournaments, the winning team of wizards getting to rule.
Jack finds out that the wizards from the two most prominent groups of Wizards called the Red Rose and the White Rose are trying to control him and make him fight for their own clique. Things get more complicated when he finds out that he should have been a Wizard and unlike other warriors he also has some magical abilities.
Chima has created a well-told story, working along the typical pattern of Young Adult Fantasy novels, but I can say it is a slightly novel approach and the background story works very well. It looks like Chima has planned a total of 5 books, each concentrating on one class of Magic and it should be fun.
In the second book of the Heir Chronicles series named The Wizard Heir, we follow the story of Seph McCauley, a 16-year old Wizard who is having problems in any school that he has tried in the last few years. Since he has difficulty controlling his powers he has been expelled from many schools with the suspicion of arson and other crimes. He is finally sent to Havens, where the Headmaster is aware of wizardry, himself being a wizard, and he welcomes Seph to his school. Initially very happy with these developments, Seph quickly notices that the Headmaster has other plans for several wizards in the school. Since the original Covenant has been broken between the various magical classes, wizards have been fighting among themselves and it is almost chaos. The Headmaster Leicester is controlling all the boy wizards in order to raise an invincible army of wizards and rewriting the Covenant to ascertain the Wizards' supremacy on the other classes. What he does not realise is that Seph will withstand all the torture and mental abuse and will be his toughest enemy.
Seph befriends a mysterious girl named Madison, who does not seem to have any magical powers but is somehow the key to their freedom.
The second book carries out from the good setup the first book has brought and reveals more secrets about all the magical classes of the Weirdlind. I did not like it as much, but still enjoyed reading the enfolding of the events.
The third book named The Dragon Heir introduces more characters entering the violent struggle between the different types of magical members of the Weirlind. This time they are dealing with mysterious objects removed from the mythical Raven's Ghyll in England where the Tournaments between the wizards were done before the Covenant between the different Weirlind classes was canceled in Book 1. One of the objects is the Dragonheart, which seems to have unparalleled power but no one knows how to use it. As different Wizard factions mobilise to get the Dragonheart back from the sanctuary offered by the town Trinity, they set in motion unexpected players and forces.
I think the third book became just too complex and does not have the same free-flowing narrative of the first two books. Although we understand the overall motivation, it is not really clear how to interpret the different interests of the various groups in the conflict and the cause-effect relationship is not very neatly depicted. I think the author just got overwhelmed by the concept she created initially and failed to deliver the clear story she had to create for each Weirlind class. It is obvious that the characters in the first three books (the ones that survive) will re-appear in books 4 and 5, but continuity of the story might be a problem.
Since my children grew up, I did not have a chance to read the last two books in the series (The Enchanter Heir and The Sorcerer Heir), but maybe one day…