Alright so I’ve now moved onto Duane’s series about cat wizards. (I haven’t fully finished the main Young Wizards series but that’s all I have as ebooks so I’ll return to it eventually.) This book focuses on the team at Grand Central that manage the worldgates that wizards use to travel around the universe more easily.
The book focuses on Rhiow, a black female cat, who is the leader of the group. She works with Saash, another female cat, and Urrah, a male cat. They go in to fix the worldgates one day and come across the young Arhu, a new feline wizard. They take him under their guidance and start fixing the worldgates with him. A crucial part of this is going Downside, to a sort of nearby universe that the worldgates originate from. However, dinosaurs roam that area and it’s a very dangerous mission to do so. They take Arhu with them on their next mission down and discover that he’s a visionary, or a wizard that can see into the future. It’s unsurprisingly pretty disconcerting for him. After that though, something goes wrong with the gates and dinosaurs start pouring out into Grand Central. The human and feline wizards contain it, but the team has to go back down and fix it more permanently.
Downside again, they run into the young dinosaur Ith who becomes friends with Arhu. Turns out that Ith is a wizard dinosaur, and also very new at this. They descend to the depths and end up confronting the Lone Power, the god that invented entropy and death. Turns out that this all has to do with the dinosaurs’ Choice. Every species is confronted by the Lone Power early on, and if you accept its agreement then the species is tricked and doesn’t live as long. If you reject the promise of more power, then you do better, but everyone dies eventually. Ith remakes the dinosaurs’ Choice, and they all take on the form of the gods and goddesses to cast the Lone Power out. Back Topside, everything is back to normal and the feline wizards continue on their work.
I’ll just start with the caveat that this isn’t really for me. I am not a big cat person, I find the amount of washing they do in the book realistic and also gross, and I am much more interested in the humans. Rhiow works with Tom and Carl, and Nita/Kit even make an appearance at one point. And honestly the fact that cats are such little idiots in real life makes me very skeptical that they would actually make it as wizards in New York City. As outdoor cats living in apartments. Suuuuure. There are some aspects of feline culture that are pretty fun, like how Urrah is obsessed with opera, and things like that. But overall, I can tell that I’m not as into it as some other people would be.
Which makes it harder when it gets really confusing and complicated. I had a hard time keeping up with the random feline language words thrown in, and their mythology is distinct from that of the human wizards. It is a lot to keep track of, especially when they start taking on the role of the gods/goddesses. I think Duane does an excellent job writing it in a way where I could understand the gist of what was happening even if I didn’t quite get the details, but I definitely will need to reread this a few times to fully understand what the heck is going on.
It is a trilogy, and I will be continuing on with it.
Despite all of the reasons that I have to be skeptical, I do still have the
ebooks and therefore will read it haha. Hopefully I can grow to like these
characters more!
No comments:
Post a Comment