Mystic (Jason Denzel)

Mystic
The Mystic trilogy, Book 1
Jason Denzel
Tor
Fiction, YA Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the small mountain village of Oakspring, little ever changes, at least for the better. Pomella knows this down to her bones, knows that her lot as a commoner, the caste born to serve merchants, nobles, and the mystics who keep the land safe, may not be great, but is at least better than life as a nameless, homeless Unclaimed. Still, when she looks over her grandmother's old Book of Songs and remembers the woman's heretical ideas - that anyone can learn to connect to the magical Myst of the land, not just nobles - and sees the silver phantom animals in her garden that nobody else sees, she can't help wondering and dreaming of a brighter, better future, one not crushed under her stern father's heel. Then, on the night of the Springrise festival, a green man messenger rises from the earth in the middle of town and says that the new High Mystic of the land has summoned candidates to become her new apprentice... and she has named Pomella.
It's an outrage, a direct insult to the daughter of the local lord, who immediately declares that if Pomella sets one foot outside her baron father's land she'll be branded Unclaimed or killed. Her father outright forbids it as madness above her station. But Pomella can't let this one chance to escape commoner life, to chase her grandmother's dream, go... even if it means leaving her father, her brother, her friends, and Sim, the blacksmith's son for whom she's developed more-than-friendly feelings that are clearly reciprocated. Just getting to the High Mystic's tower at Kelt Apar is the first of many challenges; she must prove herself to both the Mystic and the other noble candidates, but most importantly to herself.

REVIEW: The plot here looked more than a little familiar, but familiarity doesn't always mean boring. In this case, unfortunately, it also didn't mean exciting or interesting. Pomella is the typical insecure (yet inherently gifted) young adult heroine, whipsawing between bravery and cowardice, self-conviction and self-loathing, at the drop of a hat. Around her is the usual cast of characters one would expect in this story: a local love interest, a potential new love interest, a father who is dour and controlling simply for the sake of being dour and controlling, snobbish rivals who look down on her for existing, and a host of allies and enemies who line up for or against her simply because she's the protagonist in a story and therefore must be that important. None of them feel particularly deep, often with the simplest of motivations. Pomella herself tends toward helplessness as her first response most of the time, only rising to challenges after being pushed and beating herself up, and even then she can be somewhat slow on the uptake and prone to wallowing in "I'm helpless and can't do anything!" angst even when time is of the essence and she really, really needs to do something, anything, please stop whining and think for half a second because you've proven umpteen times before that, no, you're not helpless and, yes, you can do something. The world she inhabits has some interesting bits and neat details, like the silvery fae animals, but never becomes more than a flat backdrop to a very familiar tale. It gains a little extra dimension by giving Sim his own journey, accidentally falling with a mercenary band on a sinister mission, but it still ultimately comes down to Pomella being the center of the story universe and everyone and everything else falling into orbit around that fact. It's not a terrible story for all that, and it hits its marks with reasonable competence, but it's so similar to numerous other young adult fantasies that it's already fading into background noise, and I literally just finished listening to it.

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