Foundlings

For Christmas a few years ago, my Gma and Gpa got me this book. It's by Matthew Christian Harding, and is the first book of a trilogy called "The Peleg Chronicles." Now, if you know your Bible, you would know that Peleg was a man who lived between Noah and Abraham, which gives you a hint on what its time era is.

It took me a while to get into it, but mostly because, at first, I found some of it slightly confusing, mostly shifts between chapters and characters, and the book has a slightly peculiar writing style that takes getting used to, but once I got into it, I devoured it.

It's a rather new genre, without a real label, but it's category on Amazon is Christian Fantasy and Sci-fi. It doesn't even really fit with the normal young-earth genre book. There's no magic, and it takes place in the post-tower-of-babel era. There are dwarves, dragons, sea serpents, and pagan priests who want to make human sacrifices of some of the characters, and tons of adventure and excitement.

Since it was written by a man, it's not surprising that the cast is mostly male. Of the protagonists, there were only two girls, Suzie and Mercy. There also appear to be three more women in the other two books, Mercy's aunt and cousin, and the Witch Elsa, who is one of the villeins. The one thing I wonder about this book is some of the names, like Mercy and Strongbow, sound rather English and I would have thought that people living in that era and that people group wouldn't be speaking English, but something more like Hebrew, but that aside, I guess an author has a right to name his characters whatever he wishes.

The character that I liked best was Thiery, one of the titular foundlings.  The first thing I liked was his name. Don't ask why, I just liked it. Thiery, Thiery, Thiery ... It has a nice ring to it. Anyways, in the beginning of the book, he doesn't have any idea who his parents were, but he is an aspiring ranger of sorts and serves under slow-witted man whose father was a Giant named Oded. Oded follows the true faith, as does Thiery. Thiery then adopts the other titular foundling, Suzie, and makes her his sister, which causes some confusion to those who know who Thiery's father is when they assume that she is his real sister. He is very protective of his adopted sister. I also liked that he had a pet wolf. I personally believe that all growing boys need a pet wolf.

Well, at least a pet dog.

Anyways, this was a really great book, and I would love to get my hands on the other two books, especially since it had a severely cliff-hanger ending.

Here's a link to the author's site.