A Review: A. Hellene's Second Sojourn

Sometimes books seem to read themselves. The pages just fly by with the ease and speed of a film. There are no groaning lapses in momentum that readers need to suffer through.

This book offers such an experience.

Hellene's Second Sojourn is the second in the Swordbringer series and it is an incredible study in the art of momentum in story-telling.

Which is funny, because I felt that The Last Ancestor's biggest issue was a fairly significant lull during the second third of the book. It wasn't a bad read by any means- it was good and often great. It is the Terminatir 1 to Terminator 2. One is a good, sometimes great Sci-Fi movie. One is one of the best movies ever made.

That’s how I feel about this book.

Okay, I'll tell you, I did not enjoy the opening. It introduced new monsters that appear for only a scene and without building enough tension to make the battle matter. It dragged.

And then the story started. Right away we open with a mystery that promises not to resolve until far later in the book. We've all seen this before. The author hangs an answer on the end of a stick and makes us chase it til the end. Except that isn’t Second Sojourn. We get the answer right away and the story starts in earnest. And it’s an Odyssey kind of a thing that sends our heroes hurtling through unknown countries contending with impossible monsters big and small, human and alien.

And when the action starts, it doesn’t stop.

I’ve always felt action is one of the hardest things for an author to write. How can a writer strike the balance between easily imaginable and descriptive and the fast and frenzied chaos necessary to make action fun? And yet Hellene seems to do this effortlessly. The action flows without being over simplified. The descriptions make everything easy to picture. This is the telepathy Steven King described in On Writing. The author has, as if by magic, managed to transfer images from his head into mine.

It isn’t all perfect of course- I had trouble imagining the fine interiors of Pysh and even the tysgga(a strange, semi intelligent sea creature) were hard to picture- though i’ll admit that might be a fault of my own un-careful reading.

But also, the character work in this book is far, far better than it’s predecessor. Each character is given the chance to make selfish, stupid choices with extremely negative consequences. The consequences were largely absent from Swordbringer, except for the leader's big blunder. But here, we see each person struggling with morality, with cowardice, with faith and doubt. I just loved it all.

Hellene brings back the chapter headings from the first book where, like a Greek chorus to a Sophocles drama, an excerpt of some dead scholar or character will summarize the key point of the chapter for the reader. It’s very effective and works really, really well here.

In short, Second Sojourn is a triumph. A truly great piece of pulpy Sci-Fi. Read it.

https://www.amazon.com/Second-Sojourn-Swordbringer-Book-ebook/dp/B08RHDCSCZ