The Warded Man is set in a world where each night, demonic creatures arise from some other plane of existence to menace humanity. While they can be held at bay using a complex language of written characters called "wards," very few have the knowledge to draw them effectively. This book tracks three separate stories of young children growing into adulthood in this world. Arlen, disgusted when his father's weakness costs his mother's life, sets out to learn all he can about warding. Leesha, an outcast among her village, finds purpose when she becomes apprentice to the wise local healer. Rojer, who loses both his parents at a very young age, falls in with a traveling entertainer and learns the trade. Years later, all three find that their fates are intertwined.
I really went on a journey with this book. At first, I was very much into it. Brett's writing is much less dense than most high fantasy, in an appealing way. Every night that I read The Warded Man, I could see myself making progress through a book of uncommonly reasonable length. And yet it didn't feel like any world-building had been sacrificed to reach a lower word count. I found this realm of wards and demons to be interesting.
I also appreciated that even though the three characters were all young -- two start early in their teens, and one is younger still -- these children weren't written conventionally as children. They weren't always making impulsive decisions just to speed the plot, and they were credibly aged by the weight of their difficult experiences. They weren't behaving childishly. I was into each of their story lines, even if I was wishing that the inevitable uniting of the three would come sooner. (But it's a five book series, I knew. So I figured that the three characters meeting up wasn't even something destined to happen in this first book.)
But somewhere around the two-thirds point of the book, Brett made what I found to be a massively distasteful choice with the narrative. Both a spoiler and trigger warning -- Leesha is raped. A book club could debate whether this was a necessary turning point for the character, sufficiently earned by the setup that had come before. But I just found myself gut-punched, confused about why Brett felt we had to go there.
And suddenly, I was looking in retrospect at the book so far and realizing this wasn't a one-off decision: it was just the most impossible-to-miss sign of a story not just male-centric (as fantasy often is), but to a great extent anti-women. How had the stories for the other two main characters gotten started? Why, with the deaths of their mothers! (Sure, okay, one also lost his father, but still....) And what of the other female characters in the story? We'd met a loving wife, lovingly devoted to an often-absent husband, who takes one of the main characters under her wing as a "project." There was a fleeting love interest who only stood in the way of what one of the main characters really wanted. I suppose there was one stronger female character in Leesha's mentor, the village healer -- but it seemed as though others respected her only because she was useful, and her power came at a cost of withdrawing totally from society.
I was having a real eye-opening, glass-shattering moment with this book. I'd quite liked it so far, and had already been making plans to continue with the series. (Maybe even without reading something else in between books! Quite unlike me.) I had been enjoying it so much that I confess I didn't even seriously consider just stopping at that point. Still, what followed just wasn't the same for me. The three characters did unite, had their heroic adventure bonding them together, and things were put in place for their story to continue.
Yet the damage had been done. Here was an author who could imagine demons emerging from the ground every night... but who could seemingly imagine only misery and misogyny for any of his female characters.
And now I have a choice to make. Well -- two, I suppose; the first being, what do I rate this book? It was on its way to earning an enthusiastic A in my eyes until I suddenly reevaluated it and saw all the flaws. Does that average out to a B? Or does it drag the whole thing down to something much, much lower?
The other choice is whether to continue the series. I was really enjoying the book. Do I take the chance that this was just an unfortunate series of choices made in setting up the larger story? That if I continue, the assembled team of three will have adventures together that won't feel so... icky? I decided to blog about The Warded Man in large part to see if any of my readers have read the series, and have any thoughts on what follows.
But then, there are so many fantasy books out there to read. Maybe it's best to just cut my losses here and try one of those.
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