The Sundering

This series goes for the high style, flowery mythos of The Silmarillion but crossed with the more personal story of The Lord of the Rings. This is not just the usual classic epic fantasy ripping off Tolkien’s Middle Earth, featuring hard-to-pronounce names, young heroes who rise from the bowels of obscurity into world-changing prominence, magical lands and magical objects, a clutch of non-human races including dwarves, elves, dragons, and the like. Well, actually, The Sundering includes all of the above, but it’s all got a very interesting twist on the whole “let’s band together and defeat the dark lord” thing. The twist here is that Carey is writing Sauron’s Tale, not Frodo’s. This is the story from the “bad guys’” perspective, except that the bad guys are not really the classical bad guys, but have rather been propagandized as evil by the good side. It’s an interesting twist on the whole good vs. evil paradigm. The whole thing comes off as a tragic tale where the misunderstood younger brother gets the short end of the stick, and when he rises up to restore order to the world, gets cast down as a doomed villain. Carey excels at writing rich, complex characters and developing elaborate and lush landscapes. She does so here with The Sundering, creating a lovechild between Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Keshie’s Dart.