THE THITHERLANDS

In Black’s fantasy novel, a young human woman is transported to a magical realm.

Twenty-one-year-old Chicago waitress Althea MacMillan is celebrating getting her GED and thinking about little else when a mysterious figure accosts her in an alley and drugs her into unconsciousness. When she wakes, she’s in a strange room with her sarcastic abductor, who taunts her about the stupidity of “Awayfolk” like herself and laments his apparent assignment to escort her to a different world (a world without a name; she dubs it “the Thitherlands”) where her destiny awaits. She’s immediately attended by a towering, bat-winged gargoyle named Athelstan, and the three of them are soon transported to her “manse” in the Thitherlands, an immense and partially ruined wooden keep overseen by a solitary little brusque female goblin. At first, Althea is too stunned to do much more than attend to her basic needs, but after a time she begins to explore the grounds. She befriends an inquisitive crow who turns out to be a shape-shifter named Corvus; in his human form, he is “so beautiful that it almost hurt to look at him.” Readers know early on that Corvus may be hiding duplicitous motives, but Althea is far more concerned with coming to understand her place in her new world. On Earth, she’d bounced around between foster homes and the streets, but in the Thitherlands, she’s apparently an absolute monarch whose word is law. The shock of her new circumstances leaves her unbalanced, which makes her vulnerable to the scheming of a newcomer to the manse (“I mistook blood for family,” she bitterly confesses at one point). Since she can’t go home again, can she make this new world her home?

Black takes the standard fish-out-of-water plot structure of so many fantasy novels and invests it with far more day-to-day details than are usually provided, which is both a strength and a weakness of the novel. The benefit is that the author includes a vast number of relatable pragmatic considerations that confront Althea once she finds herself in her ancestral dwelling in the Thitherlands; readers stumble along with her as she gradually figures out how things work, from prosaic matters of dining and bathing to the broader functioning of her kingdom. The downside of Black’s approach is that the steady ladling out of these details effectively kills dramatic tension and opens the door to a large amount of tedium. The novel is already prone to this problem as it’s drastically overlong (this is, at most, a 400-page story rattling around through well over 700 pages of text)—some readers will doubtlessly finish this first volume hoping the second one is either slimmer or more thickly packed with incident. The author has a sharp ear for lively dialogue and fills many of the pages with characters griping with each other, snapping at each other, and quipping to each other. While the tangles of the actual plot machinations are introduced frustratingly late in the story, they do serve to quicken the book’s final hundred pages. Before this point, there’s a certain level of interest in discovering, alongside Althea, the ways of this odd fantasyland, where she has far deeper roots than she ever had back in Chicago. And it helps that Althea herself is endearingly human.

An intriguing but excessively protracted first installment in a fantasy series.