Stella Atrium is the author of a complicated and intricate series of books about the planet Dolvia, with a wide and diverse range of characters, motivations, events, and perspectives. Don’t start with THE MATRIX OPAL, though, if you can help it; start with The Bush Clinic, and go on from there. To do otherwise is to be thrown into the middle of an absolute whirlwind of plots and stories, and it’s sometimes difficult to find your footing. This is especially true since not much time is taken to introduce characters or explain what’s happened so far. That’s not entirely a bad thing; given how many characters there are and how much is going on, no doubt the book would need to be about twice its already-sizable length if the author included that much exposition.
That said, this book (like others in the series) is a beautiful masterpiece of worldbuilding with richly drawn characters, nuanced politics, conflicting cultures, and strange and wonderful creatures—from lemurs and gualareps (large telepathic lizards) to the magnificent oceanic sea serpents who rule the waves and command human fetches to do their bidding. The author switches points of view almost every chapter, but her characters have distinctive enough voices that this is rarely confusing. Also, it does give us a richer and more multidimensional perspective on what’s happening personally and politically. There’s even a distinctive grammatical pattern that singles out the Stroenuk characters (the tribal “whispering people” of the stone forest) and makes it obvious when one of them is speaking. For example, Ariseng describing a magic ward-setting: “To be explaining my process is unnecessary since the Arrivi pair are wanting magic.”
None of the characters falls flat; they all have a history, a family background, realistic motivations and purposes, and lively personalities that interact and sometimes conflict in believable and frequently entertaining ways. And since the story is presented in first person through their eyes, the reader gets to watch their characters grow, learn, and experience things from the inside—making us really care about what happens to them. We even hear the sea serpents’ thoughts, as well as those of the lizard gualareps, and seeing them as sapient beings with feelings and understanding of their own adds power and dramatic force to some of the later events in the story.
The plot—plots, rather, because there are usually several of them going on at any given time—are engaging and intricate, with political calculations, personal relationships, and cultural differences all playing their part in the tangles. All in all, this is a marvelous, detailed, and intricate world with a wide variety of stories. It would be a shame to miss out on any of it.
Another in Stella Atrium’s Dolvia series, and the first of the Duchy Wars books, THE MATRIX OPAL: A Dystopian Science Fiction Novel weaves together the lives and voices of its diverse array of characters and viewpoints, both human and nonhuman, into a rich and colorful tapestry of adventure, loss, love, and coming of age in time of war and political conflict. But read the earlier books first; otherwise, you’ll miss a lot.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader