Sarah's Reviews > The Naming

Remember when authors talked about landscapes, and you could tell that they might have actually stepped outside once or twice in their lives?

Remember when the male lead and the female lead in a YA book were allowed to develop a strong friendship and partnership, and any romance was left for the later books in the series?

Remember when male characters admired the beauty of female characters but didn’t act like pigs about it?

Remember when not every YA novel featured a love triangle?

I remember two series from the last decade that were really popular among my elementary and middle school friends that could be described as Star Wars in Middle-earth. One was Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle. The plot of its first novel, Eragon , was traced over from Episode IV, while book two, Eldest , was more interested in dwarf mythology, scantily-clad Elvish women, and narcissistic descriptions of the author’s self-insert character getting progressively hunkier and more magical. For over nine hundred pages. I want to give that series a snarky re-read soon, but that’s a story for another time.

If the Inheritance Cycle were a person, it would be a stereotypical nerd boy who likes dragons, mistrusts women, and is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. And if the Books of Pellinor were a person, they would be the IC guy’s reserved, introspective, gloomy yet idealistic twin sister. Of the two, I would much rather be friends with her than him.

In a vast land, studded with peaceful cities amid desolate and ruined stretches like stars and the darkness between them, there’s a petty walled village near the base of the mountains. Thane Gilman is a tyrant in his tiny domain. The servants and slaves are afraid to make a run for it, because Gilman keeps fierce hunting dogs and the mountains beyond are full of evil entities and bloodthirsty beasts.

One of these slaves is a young girl named Maerad, a dairymaid who also entertains the Thane and his friends by playing upon her lyre. Maerad’s mother died when she was little, and the other slaves are hostile to her, believing her to be a witch. She has no support network and no hope of escape.

Her luck changes when a strange man from distant parts enters the cow-byre, and she is the only person who can see him. His name is Cadvan, and he is one of the Bards, a group of wise and (ideally) benevolent mages whom Maerad had always believed were myths. But it turns out (su-prise, su-prise, su-prise) that Maerad’s bursts of “witchery” mark her as a Bard, too.

Cadvan’s path will take him across a dangerous landscape, and now he knows he’s morally obligated to take the girl with him. They will learn that a dark power, once thought vanquished, is rising again (no way!) and that corruption has reached the highest ranks of the Bards themselves.

Content Advisory

Violence: Cadvan and Maerad are frequently attacked, and sometimes seriously wounded, by supernatural beings, Bards, humans, animals, and monsters. They come across a slaughtered family in a wasteland that includes a baby. Some evil creatures order a child to murder his friend, and when he refuses they kill the second kid anyway. A traitorous Bard sets a harbor and most of its ships on fire. Maerad has scattered, disturbing flashbacks, about the sack of her home before she became a slave; a little girl of about five years, she saw her father beheaded, her mother sapped of her powers, and her home burned. As a slave, Maerad is frequently beaten, and her fellow slaves once tried to drown her in the duck pond.

Sex: Shortly before the story begins, a male slave jumped Maerad while she slept and tried to force himself on her. He did not get far in his attempted rape before she snarled a word of power at him that sent him flying and blinded him for three weeks. She remembers this incident and panics after a nice young man named Dernhil gets a bit too excited and kisses her. She panics, he apologizes, and they part as friends.

Once they get to a hospitable place and are given baths and clean clothes, both Cadvan and Maerad are struck a bit shy, because they never noticed how good-looking the other one was before.
This is not sexual content per se, but I’m not sure where else to put it: Maerad’s menarche has been delayed by poor nutrition, and it hits her unexpectedly. Poor Cadvan is the first to see her after this, and gets almost as panicked as she does. Croggon brings it up three or four more times for no apparent reason.

Language: Nil.

Substance Abuse: There’s a lot of wine at feasts, but no one ever gets drunk.

Anything Else: In Croggon’s “historical notes” at the back of the book, she takes strange pains to clarify that, despite their talk of Light and Dark and Good and Evil, the Bards did not follow any “monotheistic notions” of a personal God. This was fairly obvious from the way Light and Dark are discussed in the book—much closer to the abstractions of Star Wars than the more Biblical Creation-mythology of Tolkien. So I wondered why Croggon had to phrase it like that. It sounded rather disdainful of the Abrahamic faiths, and I thought that was unnecessary. However, one can easily skip the appendices without missing anything interesting.

Conclusion

The Naming is an odd, hard-to-classify book. Contrasted with other, similar Aussie YA high fantasies from the same general era, it’s much less inventive than Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series, has almost no whimsy or romance compared to Juliet Marillier’s Shadowfell, and is wordy and dour compared to Kate Constable’s The Singer of All Songs.
Then there’s the small fact that this 466 (492 only including the appendices) page book has no twists and very little plot, and frequently lifts similes and occasionally even dialogue right out of Tolkien.

So what kept me turning pages? Why the high rating?

Because Croggon created two wonderful characters in Cadvan and Maerad. They are noble, they are flawed, they have seen far too much death and darkness and it shows in their behavior. They want to help the downtrodden, they want to be bulwarks against the encroaching Dark, but they also know how badly a well-meaning plan can go wrong, and they are wary of everything and everyone.

It is beautiful when two souls like theirs begin to open timidly up and trust each other. In this book, it happens with perfect timing, with a lot of sweet, tiny moments of respect and friendship that I think (and hope!!!) might blossom into romantic love. Instead of manufacturing sexual tension and decoy love interests (view spoiler)[(Dernhil dies) (hide spoiler)], Croggon simply stands back and lets the reader observe what a great team these two make in every way.

Recommended to anyone who’s getting sick of the instalove and drama that comes part and parcel with YA these days, and doesn’t mind slow-paced chapters with lots of landscape description.

You may also like:

- The Old Kingdom series by Garth Nix
- The Shadowfell trilogy by Juliet Marillier
- The Chanters of Tremaris trilogy by Kate Constable
- The Annals of the Western Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Books of Bayern by Shannon Hale
- Chalice by Robin McKinley