Friday, April 13, 2018

The Fallen: Search for the Path

The Fallen by James Todd Lewis

The final entry of James Todd Lewis’ Thurian Saga opens with Terris de Bosnar, a Lupar, greeting the retired Marshal Adimar, with the two discussing the chaos the Anati, or mixed-bloods, are causing across Thuria. When the main chapters begin, Sahni is mated to Tallen, with she and Van having friend time out on a platform above a lake. In the meantime, the purebreds launch attacks all across Thuria in opposition to equal rights for mixed-breeds. Sahni continues her tutelage as a Teldear under Dynaea, with Sahni and others such as Kylie participating in rescue missions.

Among these missions is one where Sahni must rescue her sister Hylea, who is months from graduation, with the archive where Van once hid in her earlier years devastated by attacks. Meanwhile, Amyra is on life support for most of the story, with quite a few losses throughout the text. The final entry of the original Thuria series contains more religious overtones than its predecessors, with some characters venerating the Great Spirit, and the author in a brief afterword discussing these themes, alluding to C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series.

The last installment is fairly dialogue-heavy, mostly focused on racial relations, although it definitely reflects contemporary Earth society, and is overall an enjoyable read. Although the author includes a dictionary of terms and characters after the main text, placing it before the story actually begins would have been far better to give readers a glimpse into how the characters look and how terms are defined. Actual analogies for each race to Earth animals would have been welcome, too, although this reviewer supposes the Lupar, for instance, are lupines, or wolves. Even so, this is good conclusion to the first Thuria series.

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