An RAF pilot is patrolling the English Channel, looking for threats to British shipping. A submarine is spotted, and the pilot moves quickly to sink it with his plane’s torpedoes. When he returns to shore, he’s accused of having sunk a British submarine. The pilot claims otherwise, but fragments of a British sailor’s uniform are found floating on the surface near where the submarine went down.

That’s the set-up of this wartime novel; the pilot’s career then takes an abrupt right turn, and therein hangs the tale. Naturally, there’s also the love of a good woman involved, and a lot of interesting stuff happens.

On the one hand, this is probably the weakest Shute I’ve read. On the other hand, I stayed up late one night to finish it. You do the math.

This is an intriguing book. Miller’s first, it’s a remarkably clumsy endeavor; the character development is uneven, the characters’ temperaments shift with the winds of the plot, and Miller exhibits the worst ear for names I’ve run into since The Sword of Shannara. I got it to read on a plane, and otherwise might not have gotten very far with it, as the first few pages did not bode well for the rest of the book.

And yet, for all its faults I soon found myself wanting to know what was going to happen. And then there were some really neat bits of misdirection toward the end of the book, where Miller was clearly telegraphing X and then did something from another alphabet entirely. And then it ended with a cliffhanger…well, not exactly a cliffhanger…and so I had to go buy the second book, The Awakened Mage, which finishes the story. So it’s clumsy, yes, but Miller’s skill clearly increased during the writing of it, and I’m curious to see where she takes it.

It takes place in the magically protected Kingdom of Lur, a land inhabited by two races: the Olken and the Doranen. The Doranen, the ruling elite, are nearly all gifted with magical talents; they came to Lur as refugees from a sorcerous war that destroyed their home. The Olken, the native folk of Lur, are the common folk; and they don’t do magic. It’s a capital offense for them even to try. And that’s important, because magic is all that’s protecting Lur from Morg, the evil wizard who conquered the Doranen’s homeland.

Morg. I ask you.

Enter Asher, youngest son of a large family of Olken fisherman. Tired of being under his brothers’ thumbs, he sets out for the capital to seek his fortune…which naturally he finds, far more easily than you might expect. (There are prophecies involved.) And then, of course, Morg is released, naturally, and, well, it doesn’t sound particularly fresh, does it?

And yet there’s something there. I’ll let you know how it comes out.