Whimsical steampunk fantasy from indie author Velora Venn.

Time for another review for an indie book I encountered from the ever-wonderful Twitter Writing Community. This time it’s Aerth’s Aetheric Aegis: The White Mantle by Velora Venn. I’ve been meaning to read this one for a while, and I finally started it in December, finishing it in the last day or so, which makes it my first review of 2022! Hooray! Now, they say not to judge a book by its cover, but when I first saw this book, I was immediately entranced by its fantastic artwork (and come on, admit it, we’re all suckers for great cover art to varying degrees). In short, I think it’s a stunning looking book and the author should be rightly proud of the incredible work she’s done illustrating this. There are illustrations scattered throughout the inside of the book too, which is really lovely. As I have the ebook version, before I started reading I had to open up the book on my phone and look through the illustrations to view them in their full colourful glory. But for the actual reading of the book in comfort, I used my wife’s Kindle Paperwhite which is in greyscale. Anyway, I could go on and on about the author’s artistic skill, but what about the story itself? Let’s dive in…

Blurb

A young woman named Elvira Evenfall has grown up in the ruggedly remote, yet enchanting Falsvik Islands with her grandfather. Her life in a simple fishing village is quaint and serene, but that all changes when a looming threat to the world suddenly invades her tiny corner of it. A swarm of suspicious bats with enigmatic origins known as the Curse, which can infect people through their bites, transforming them into horrible, bat-like monsters, endangers all human life and now is made very real to Elvira and her loved ones.

Dark and controversial secrets about her family and identity also begin to surface, and before long, she’s faced with a major decision: to accept the mystical and versatile energies known as aether and assume her role as an Aethaumaturge in order to join the precarious fight for the security of Aerth, or hold onto the comforting life she so loves?

This choice is made all the easier when it is revealed that her own parents, who were thought dead, are actually still alive. Elvira’s priorities quickly change to wishing to find and return them home safely. Her decision instantly results in a corresponding new danger, though, forcing her to flee from her peaceful village. A secret society of Aethaumaturges promises to keep her safe in Brume, the impressive and imposing capital of the country of Lluminox.

A host of obstacles and an assortment of characters are met along the way. While she struggles to gain control of her new powers, she also must decipher her similarly new, unanticipated romantic feelings for two separate individuals — one male, and one female.

It becomes increasingly clear, through her interactions, that the world isn’t just plagued by a pandemic, but also an elite ruling class of superior people who often exploit the underprivileged and abuse their power. These people, known as Ascendants, are a vestige of the Archaic Era, a technologically-advanced time period from hundreds of years prior that was considered the pinnacle of mankind, but concluded with civilization collapsing and the destruction of nearly all humankind, due to the ancient peoples’ malice and selfishness.

Review

I honestly had fun reading this story. It’s marketed as “whimsical”, and I feel it certainly fits that bill, and there’s a lot to like here. It’s not without its issues (most of which comes down to personal preference), but overall I think the story achieved what it set out to do. Firstly I want to talk about the characters. The character work in this book is easily its biggest strength, there’s such wonderful depth to these characters and we get to learn so much about them as people. They feel real, relatable and they have some excellent moments together. There’s a tangible sense of growth, and each character is uniquely likeable. They’re flawed, they make mistakes, they panic, and they carry the weight of the consequences of what happens to them in the book. They’re just really well put together. One thing I particularly enjoyed was that the main character, Elvira, just isn’t good at the thing everyone expects her to be. She’s not a “chosen one” in the tropey sense. She’s significant, sure, but not in that way. She comes into possession of a power she has zero familiarity with and the way she handles it is pretty realistic. She even has a guidebook of sorts, and it would have been so easy to make her get good at her powers by personal study, but I love that it still doesn’t really help her. There’s an excellent sense of camaraderie and wonderful chemistry between the characters of the main cast, and some of the side characters as well. The romance aspects were great fun as well and were responsible for some of the best character moments.

The other thing I really want to praise this book for is the sense of adventure. The worldbuilding is mostly pretty great. There’s some bits about it that didn’t quite work for me that I may touch on further along, but for the most part the variety of locations and attention paid to differing cultures within the same location are very strong. And this all contributes to the adventure of the journey the main characters make, stoking a feeling of wanderlust. The world is well realised and detailed. At the same time, this whimsical sense of adventure is cut with the foreboding of the quest the main characters find themselves on, the dangers inherent in travelling so far from home, the uncertainty of who to trust and who to steer clear of. This all circles back around to the excellent character work I mentioned above. I also mentioned the attention to culture details within the same settings - these are things like the differences between the attitudes, dress, behaviours and mannerisms of the ruling class as opposed to the ordinary people, and again to those who live in squalor and those others who are seen as criminal. There’s an excellent undercurrent of counterculture present here, as well as the main characters experiencing culture shock. The three things that didn’t quite work for me here were: 1. the timescale - this is set 500 years after the technological golden age of humanity. Given some of the things that are mentioned I didn’t feel like this was enough. 2. there’s an inconsistency in the level of technology here. This is a steampunk universe, so there’s the expectation that things ought to fit that aesthetic, but I had a hard time reconciling some of that with the technologies at play - an odd mix of archaic and extraordinarily advanced that in some places worked really well, while in others pulled me out of it a bit. 3. finally, the backronyms. I did find myself thinking that some of the words being used as acronyms would have stood perfectly fine on their own - Havocs and the Curse being the biggest ones. I didn’t feel like they needed to have any other reason to be called that.

The background concept is great stuff. It’s essentially a sort of post-apocalyptic setting. For some reason when it came to the Ascendants, my mind immediately went to Khan Noonien Singh and his genetically modified master race from Star Trek. I can offer absolutely no elaboration on that thought process because I don’t know why I went there straightaway, but there it is.

Looking at the plot and pacing, I didn’t feel there was anything here that dragged or bloated the story in terms of narrative beats. Everything moved along nicely. And from beginning to end, the plot was exciting, imaginative and engaging. That’s not to say there weren’t issues here, because there were some personal preference things that prevented me from enjoying the book as much as I really wanted to. The prose, namely, and by extension, the length of the book. They go hand in hand, really. I felt like there were a lot of redundancies in the text and a propensity for over-indulgence that made it difficult for me to read, and which resulted in chapters being longer than I felt necessary. There’s quite a lot of strange adverb usage as well that left me scratching my head (specifically talking about the adjectives being turned into adverbs, not the concept of adverbs themselves - such as something being “said explanatorily”). I’ve got mixed feelings on adverbs as a writer - they’re a tool like any other and I won’t begrudge anyone making use of them. I use them in moderation, and I fully appreciate some enjoy them more than others. All I can say really is that the usage here wasn’t to my taste and it did slow my reading down. But you know what? Back on a positive note I want to praise the proofreading. There’s a couple of substitutions that slipped the net, but there’s almost nothing in the way of typos. I think I counted maybe two, and for a book of this length, that’s something. There’s far more in something like Dune or Foundation, which have been through multiple edits in their 50-70 year lifespans. Also to add complexity to the prose thing, a lot of it was really beautifully delivered, particularly in descriptions. The personal preference thing is that I find substantial amounts of it hard to engage with, but honestly that’s just me.

Overall, then, this was pretty enjoyable and I would recommend it. Despite my saying the prose wasn’t to my taste, it’s far outweighed by the book’s strengths, and if you like a lot of beautifully descriptive work then I think you’ll enjoy this.