The Black Prism (Brent Weeks)

The Black Prism
The Lightbringer series, Book 1
Brent Weeks
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: In a world where light itself fuels magic, the Prism - able to draft from all colors, from sub-red to super-violet and the visible spectrum between - is the most powerful mage... but at a cost. Like all drafters, Gavin Guile pays for his power in life, but while most run the risk of madness and premature death, a Prism knows exactly how many years remain. With only five left, he has five more great deeds he aims to accomplish.
Then he receives word of a bastard son he never knew he had, just as an unusual number of color wights - former drafters gone mad and inhuman from gifts run amok - seem to be plaguing the land.
Now, the Seven Satrapies and the Chromeria, where light drafters are trained, face a new threat: a self-proclaimed king who would throw down the old ways and the god Orholam Himself. And Gavin, his untested and untrained son Kip, and a handful of others are all that stand in his way.

REVIEW: I've been feeling an itch for an epic fantasy for a while, and this looked like a likely candidate to scratch it. Weeks kicks things off with an excellent magic system based on light and color, drafting a diverse and complex world with plenty of darkness and gray areas, and introduces a decidedly atypical character in Kip. Unlike many would-be fantasy heroes, Kip is no gangling daydreamer who just needs a little light encouragement and obligatory friendly mentor to claim his destiny as leader and warrior and claimant to the attractive mate of choice; he's a flabby boy, a terrible fighter, useless in the matter of romance, and his only initial talent - aside from a tongue that's prone to saying just the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong person - is not dying while far more capable people fall around him. Gavin isn't quite the father figure a boy like him would want or need, either, hiding his own great secret that Kip's very presence could expose... but, like Kip, he does try to do the honorable thing when remotely feasible, even if he often judges wrong. Pretty much everyone in this book is trying, and often failing, to do right more often than not, a trait that kept them interesting (and kept me reading) even when I didn't particularly like what they did or how they rationalized it. Indeed, much of the story is driven by rationalized misdeeds and attempts to cover for past injustices without directly addressing or owning them, from the small personal mistakes to the larger crimes wrought by whole nations during war and peace. Things start quickly and keep moving with plenty of action, intrigue, magic, violence, and no small amount of humor, the relatively short chapters (by epic fantasy standards in particular) making the six hundred-odd pages fly by. By the end, the already-blurred moral lines are further smudged, setting up some great complications for the next installment. This was just the book I needed to sate my epic fantasy hunger, though on the down side it does add at least one more long title to my book wish list. (After having tried and given up on a few books before settling on this one, it's a problem I'm happy to have.)

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