Asian American Literature Fans

By Stephen Hong Sohn

Taran Matharu’s, The Battlemage, is the final installment in the Summoner trilogy, which has definitely been one of my favorite YA trilogies. The rather anemic editorial description at B&N doesn’t do that much for us, so suffice it to say that the conclusion of the last installment left Fletcher and friends making a hasty escape from the Orcs through a portal that leads them into the ether. For the uninitiated, the ether is the domain of the demons, certainly not anywhere that living beings can survive for long periods. Indeed, without the ingestion of a special kind of plant, living beings will eventually die there, so Fletcher and his allies must find a way out of the ether and hatch a longer-term plan about how they will sustain their existences if they run out of that plant. The first half of the novel involves the team’s trials and tribulations in the ether: they must battle Khan, the evil white orc, along with hordes of other demons. They are occasionally assisted by a magnificent new demon of their own, a turtle-like creature called a Zaratan (that no one can actually harness and therefore control). Eventually, through a little bit of luck and persistence, Fletcher and friends find the plant they need, while also fortuitously finding a portal out of the ether. From here, the team must find a way to forward information about the dastardly plans of some of the other nobles, the ones who essentially planned their demise by pushing them into the doomed mission that was the subject of book 2. Because of the corrupt regime, Fletcher and friends, despite having evidence of the treachery, cannot assume that those in power will cast out their duplicitous cronies. Fortunately, Fletcher and his merry band persist and also are able to overcome the twisted regime structure, but then Fletcher is left with an entirely new task: to take over the mantle as the royal of a particular region of the kingdom, the location that borders the Orc lands. He’s going to need an army and a new set of colonists, if he is to have any luck sustaining a new settlement, but the novel’s second half flags severely in this area.

Matharu sort of has two distinct narratives to deal with in this final installment, and it’s difficult really to create the proper pacing because of this incredible shift. The back half sees the reader traipsing through a resettlement sequence, training montage narratives, and other such moments in order to generate what will necessarily be the climactic battle between Khan, who is still very much alive, and Fletcher, very much harried by his time as a publicly recognized royal (recall that he didn’t even realize he was from such a prestigious background until it was unveiled in book 2). Matharu’s concluding battle is so viciously wrought that I almost wondered how the novel was supposed to be wrapped up so quickly. The author clearly knows genre conventions: he stacks the deck to make it look as though all hope is lost at multiple points, but somehow, someway, we know that good will prevail.

If there’s one beef I had about this particular series it’s that Matharu’s world building doesn’t allow for enough Pokemon-type content. Because summoners only have so much energy available to gain a new demon (and because demon-catching itself is so difficult), there isn’t much opportunity for the team to gain new demons to use in battle. There is only one distinct new demon that is harnessed in the entire text by Fletcher and his allies in the ether, so that was a bit of letdown. My attitude here was amplified by the lexicon of demons that Matharu actually provides at the conclusion, where you get a full description of rare, sought after demons and their powers. In any case, Matharu has already stated in interviews that this particular fictional world is based upon an analogic relationship to racial differences in our own, so this series gets huge kudos for me for resisting the kind of abstractions that make the YA paranormal genre so challenging to consider as a viable teaching and even scholarly option. Whatever my minor quibbles about YA or even Matharu’s final book in this series, I’m following whatever he produces in the future, including what looks like a prequel series that will focus on Arcturus, one of Fletcher’s mentors. Bring it on!

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Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Leslie J. Fernandez

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Leslie J. Fernandez, PhD Student in English, at lfern010@ucr.edu