Now this book is just too silly for words: an absurdly earnest mixture of
Modesitt-style fantasy, pop psychology, and romance novel shtick. Let me
tell you a little about it.

There are five branches of magic, Air, Earth, Fire, Water, and Spirit.
Every person in Green’s world is more or less capable in one of these
areas. Most people are Lows. Some are Middles, and some are Highs–and
every person revealed to be a Middle must go to the capitol and be tested
to see whether or not they are Highs. Our tale concerns five such
people, one from each of the five aspects. This is Very Significant, for
the nation in which they live is ruled by the Ruling Blending. The
Ruling Blending is a team of five people, one from (of course) each of
the five aspects, who have not only learned to merge their magic
together, but who won their place through fierce competition.

This competition is held every twenty-five years, and the winning
Blending rules the nation for the next twenty-five years. A great deal
is at stake, here, and so of course there is great incentive to skew the
results. Our five heroes are not supposed to win, and of course they
will, though not in this book (it’s the first of five in a series called,
natch, “The Blending”).

So who are our charming five? First, there’s a sea-captain who has no
interest in being a High, even for the power the position holds; he just
wants to live on the sea. Why? Because although he’s a rough, tough,
extremely handsome well-built man, he’s claustrophobic. He simply cannot
stand to be cooped up inside.

Then there’s the astonishingly beautiful young woman who has been
seriously traumatized by a forced marriage to elderly sadistic lecher
whose business interests her father wished to control. The old lecher is
dead, now, and her father wishes to marry her off again. She’d rather die.

Which brings us to our young gentleman, the sheltered, protected son of
one of the highest-born ladies in the realm, one of those poisonous women
who live through their children. He’s never
before been anywhere without his mother, and he has no idea of how the
world works. But he’s extremely handsome, and remarkably well-built,
because one of the servants showed him how to exercise.

Then there’s our astonishingly beautiful lady of the evening with a heart of gold,
the leading courtesan from a major provincial city. She’s no interest in
being a High, either, but coming to the capitol to be tested got her out
from under the thumb of her erstwhile madam. Remarkably, she’s the one
with the least emotional baggage, even though she doesn’t think that love
is real.

And finally there’s the farmer’s son from the boondocks, a truly decent salt-of-the-earth
type who sincerely wants to be a High. He’s hampered by two things: the
fear of trying to use more magical power than he can control and thereby turning
himself into a vegetable, and the narrow and limited moral code he grew
up with that tells him that the courtesan’s profession is simply wrong, a
problem since he’s rapidly falling in love with her–and she with him,
although she doesn’t believe him. Have I mentioned that he’s extremely
handsome, with a hard body from all that farm work?

And so all of them have baggage, and all of them have issues, and oh,
they all have such wonderful and growthful advice for each other, and
such astonishing insights into what makes everyone else tick. It’s like
inviting Oprah Winfrey into your fantasy novel. It’s so wonderful to
watch all of them growing into healthfulness. And then, of course, five of them are
such wonderful people, not like any of the other folks in the story, all
of whom are twisted, evil, manipulative users–at best.

I’ll give the author this much–despite all the anachronistic
pop-psychology and the absurd characters, and despite the five-fold
symmetry that means we get to hear about all of the testing and training
in five times over in five slightly different yet still tedious
flavors–despite all that, I say, she managed to hold my attention to the
end of the book. I’m not sure whether that means that Ms. Green can
really spin a tale, or whether she just pressed enough of the right
buttons amid all of the unintentionally hilarious wrong ones to keep me
going.

I’ve given the book to Jane to read, because I want her opinion. I know
a little bit about being a man, having been one lo these many years, and
the leading men in this tale don’t strike me as being men. Instead, they
strike me as a romance novelist’s fantasy of what desirable men should be
like. But it could be that I’m doing the romance genre a disservice, as
I don’t read them.

I’m mildly curious about the next book in the series, as the whole
testing/training/bootcamp kind of tale appeals to me for some reason;
it’s why I like L.E. Modesitt, Jr.‘s books. But it’s not
a good sign when you find yourself giggling at a book rather than with it.

We’ll see what Jane says.