At seventeen all that Clariel wishes is to get away from her distant mother and weak father to join the Borderers and take care of the Great Forest. Her station in life dictates another path when her family move to the royal city of Belisaere, where unbeknownst to Clariel a wild magic creature stalks the streets...

Clariel (2014. 482 pages) is an Old Kingdom prequel novel, written by Garth Nix, whose previous works have included Sabriel, Lirael and Abhorson.

This young adult novel is set six hundred years before the birth of Sabriel and, for those unfamiliar with his earlier works, the book contains two pages of maps to orientate the reader. This is a world where magic is common place, especially strong amongst Clariel and her extended family, who is no common girl, but related to the king.

She dreams of glorious solitude in the forest and with the connivance of her aunt has been sneaking out to learn the ways of the Borderers, her parents have other plans. As she does not wish to follow in her parents footsteps and join the guild of goldsmiths, they move her to the kingdom's capital in the hopes of securing an advantageous marriage. Things in the city are not well as the King refuses to wield any authority, leaving a power vacuum, which Kilp intends to fill, agreeing to a marriage between his son and Clariel, he hopes to place her on the throne and command the kingdom from the shadows.

The book did feel a little unbalanced and the plot is a very slow build, much time is spent with Clariel, in the city and a hundred and eighty pages are filled before events depicted in the prologue start to join up with the main plot, it made the dénouement feel somewhat rushed.

You also have to really enjoy the character of Clariel, as the book spends the majority of its time in her company, this does mean that her constant complaints, to all and sundry that she just wants to go and live in the forest, may be news to whomever she meets, but it does become a little repetitive to the reader, imbuing Clariel with a bit of a whinging character.

If the main character is flawed the same cannot be said for the writing or high degree of world building. I presume that Nix did not look upon this as a stand-alone novel, but there is enough about the Free and Charter Magic, the various interrelationships between the king and the Abhorsen’s to get a feel for the world.

It’s not a bad book, but I feel that it will more readily appeal to those who have read and enjoyed the previous ones.

7

Charles Packer