SPIRIT OF THE KING

In Hay’s debut YA fantasy series starter, a young warrior must choose between two opposing masters.

Eighteen-year-old Aria has grown up on a compound controlled by Keriggor, a powerful spirit-being who raids villages to capture humans, like her, who have spiritual connections. The other members of her family didn’t serve Keriggor’s needs, so they were murdered long ago by the magician’s Shadowers—demonic creatures with alligator faces. Aria, however, is Keriggor’s servant, bearing his dark mark on her forehead, and he’s been grooming her as his apprentice. Just as Aria is about to make a covenant binding herself to Keriggor forever, she experiences a vision of a different, kinder being: a man named Eli who tells her that he’s a king. She manages to escape Keriggor’s compound under the protection of Eli’s spirit. Now, for the first time that she can remember, she’s on her own in a wintry wilderness, and she only has Eli to guide her. After months of travel, she meets Daven and his friends—rangers in the service of Corinnia, a city under the king’s protection. She’s granted asylum there, but it’s clear from the outset that most of its residents don’t fully trust her. Indeed, they’re right to doubt her, for Keriggor’s influence on her still lingers, and she isn’t quite ready to fully commit herself to Eli. As she’s pulled back and forth between the two figures—who are influenced, at times, by others who serve them—Aria isn’t sure what she wants for herself. She’ll have to decide sooner rather than later, as in the inevitable battle to come, she’ll be forced to pick a side.

Over the course of this book, Hay’s prose is simple yet atmospheric in style, and it illuminates a world where the spiritual and physical exist side by side. At one point, for instance, Aria marvels at her first physical meeting with Eli: “After claiming to be a king, one would assume a spirit would manifest itself in a way that conveyed such a title, but there was nothing majestic in his physical appearance….To human eyes, his plain features and simple attire made him seem insignificant.” Aria is portrayed as feisty and willful—in fact, she’s a bit reminiscent of the Game of Thrones character with the similar name of Arya—and she brings a recognizably human perspective to this allegory of good and evil. It’s an allegory, however, that feels rather on-the-nose; disappointingly, the book’s moral complexity is no greater than that of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, so there’s no real sense of suspense surrounding Aria’s ultimate decision. Although the use of such a Manichaean framework doesn’t always make for an uninteresting plot, Hay fails to embellish hers with intriguing secondary characters or a truly immersive setting. As a result, there simply isn’t enough in these pages to hold readers’ interest, and Aria’s actions feel far less urgent than they should.

A fantasy novel about the clash of good and evil that fails to capture the imagination.