Jornis is a small-town mayor living down a failure in imperial politics; his son Vernon is a bookish boy who harbors an unlikely fondness for the empire his father left behind. Vernon’s best friends are Iyna – the tomboy training with a spear every day, eager to join the militia – and Niyaa, the playful little girl whose greatest joy is her family. All of their lives are irreparably changed when Beast Riders attack their town, and although none of them know how and when they might meet again, all four find themselves increasingly embroiled in imperial politics, classism and racism, and a growing war which threatens the new lives they’ve struggled to build for themselves.
DL Farmer’s FRACTURED WEAPONS is a thoughtful story in a richly-imagined world. Focusing on the empire of Erium, the characters move through a series of vivid, textured spaces: cities of shimmering black stone; sacred hills where priests cultivate crystalline glass like flowers; the reedy swamps where harvesters ride massive water-striders to feed imperial paper mills. Each spot is a node in a clearly-plotted network of imperial politics: the capital, the hinterlands, minting and mining, trade hubs; the occasional maps provide a sense of shape and scale. The characters themselves don’t always fully live, but they do evince enough of an interior life to take a reader by surprise. With a core cast of four characters, FRACTURED WEAPONS manages a well-balanced structure in which the (mostly-)friends from the start of the novel grow meaningfully apart as they experience the wider world. That emotional narrative forms the heart of the text.
Unfortunately, the text itself doesn’t always live up to its lofty ambitions. As with much medieval or medieval-fantasy fiction, the tone sits uneasily between the modern-mundane and archaic-abstruse. Niyaa refers to her parents as “mom” and “dad,” and asks her friend, “are you okay?” Meanwhile, Iyna – who grew up in the same tiny border-town as Niyaa – tells a group of soldiers to hold their spears more tightly with the almost-incomprehensible order, “Reaffirm your grasp.” The prose ends up feeling overwritten, to its detriment. Phrases like “a dozen thick colossal walls” or “Iyna dumbfoundedly nodded” may not be grammatically incorrect, but they stumble rhythmically and often fail to respect adjective order rules, leaving the reader with an uncomfortable sense that something is amiss. Removing some adjectives, simplifying the language, and resolving typos would meaningfully improve the reading experience.
FRACTURED WEAPONS also sets itself a substantial structural challenge: while there are plenty of action scenes scattered throughout, the climactic moments of each arc are emotional confrontations between characters. Although these confrontations can be short in story time, they need to be long in narrative time, and in almost every instance they seem to pass by too quickly for them to leave a meaningful impact. This novel is unquestionably setting up the next in a series, but it could still spend more time sitting with its characters, and with the real damage that their own impossible decisions have done to them.
While the world and characters of DL Farmer’s FRACTURED WEAPONS are deeply imagined and lovingly rendered, the narrative structure and prose style produce too much friction for smooth enjoyment of the text.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader