Mythera Chronicles: The Lost Athenaeum by K.C.Auburn book review

Mythera Chronicles has a strong foundation, with solid worldbuilding and fairly complex characters, but the pacing is too quick, often diminishing the values of these foundations by allowing only superficial or glancing attention to be payed to them.

Our main character visit a major dwarf settlement while in the course of their journey but only spend a chapter there, and most of that devoted to an entirely different element of the world building. Our main character is introduced as a thief at the start of the narrative, yet that character trait, with all its implied skills and potential consequences, barely affects the story and is quickly supplanted by the chosen one narrative. The result, for me, was a narrative that failed to properly build to a crescendo or immersion.

That being said, the character work for the Mythera Chronicles was probably its strongest features. I found Lusha in particular to be compelling and interesting, with the combination of her lantern, the narrative of her personality slowly returning contrasted against her disassociation and the ambiguity of her motivations and end goals. Aylith, our MC, has excellent foundations as thief terrified of living in society due to her inability to control her magic, but her character progression needed to be slower, or for her character interactions with Lusha to be more organic, in the moment, as opposed to being conveyed through blunt telling. I wanted to see her being timorous/ fearful, I wanted to see Lusha actively have to struggle and fight to earn her confidence, instead of the narrative just forcing them together and them then progressing to fairly stable relationship almost immediately. Too much of Aylith’s character was invested in the ‘cannot control her power’, so that when she does begin to learn to control her power/looses the fear of it, much of her character depth disappears, leaving her fairly bland.

A major flaw I referred to above is the book’s reliance on ‘telling’ as a narrative medium; many characters are fully introduced upon meeting them, with their personalities and trustworthiness expressed openly to the reader via exposition rather than having them be gradually revealed through character interaction. The world building is often the same, with many of the major plot elements being conveyed to the reader outside the flow of the narrative rather than letting the reader experience and explore the world through the characters’ eyes.