The High and Faraway (Trilogy)

Greg Keyes

★★★☆☆

  1. The Reign of the Departed
  2. The Kingdoms of the Cursed
  3. The Realm of the Departed

This trilogy is not Greg Keyes’ best work.

The concept is really interesting: Our world has no magic because it’s the last stop in a series of realities, each of which has less magic than the next one up (and yes, it’s a series of shadows, like Roger Zelazny’s Amber). The higher and farther away, the purer the stories and stronger the magic. And they’ve all been cursed. In most of them, adults have been taken out of the picture one way or another, leaving only teenagers and children to pick up the pieces…sometimes disastrously.

The main characters are interesting too: Aster is a refugee from the more magical realms, living in our world and trying to get back on a quest. She puts Errol’s consciousness in a wooden body while he’s in a coma, coming to grips with his suicide attempt. Veronica is the kind of ghost who sparks urban legends, brought back somewhere between life and death. They all grow over the course of the series, and they all read as teenagers (including the kinds of mistakes they make!)

But…

The editing is bad, especially by the third book, which is extremely disjointed. The resolution comes completely out of nowhere, despite having three whole books to set it up. A current of misogyny runs through the first two books, with a constant threat of sexual violence by the villains hanging over everything, which is made worse by the fact that almost everyone is a teenager. That dissipates by the third book, but it makes parts of the others really unpleasant to read.

I picked them all up at once, knowing only that an author I used to keep up with had written a bunch of books that I’d missed. If I’d been reading them one at a time, as they came out, I don’t think I would have finished. And I rarely leave books unfinished. I really hope the other two books of his that I bought at the same time are better than these.

I’d absolutely recommend the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone quadrilogy, Age of Unreason, or The Waterborn and The Blackgod. But not this one.