Like Ranhald's voice, Gary Stowe's words are "resonant and melodious," poetically employed with the "delicate touch of long practice," making it difficult to believe The Child of Hope is his debut novel. Stowe is more than a mere storyteller. In a field filled with retold tales and variations upon aging themes, he stands out as a craftsman, a masterful wordsmith with a prosaic voice and an undeniable understanding of the elements of story.
Stowe is a gifted writer. He paints a vivid picture with his prose - something that is integral to fantasy because it helps the reader visualize the author's imagined world. That Stowe achieves this without overburdening his prose is a rare treat indeed. His brush strokes are clean and crisp, his imagined world unfettered by the fictitious facts of world-building. Modern fantasists tend toward over-complexity, often losing their stories within the worlds they create. Stowe's secondary world is exactly that - secondary to the story - and as such is woven seamlessly into its tapestry using the author's loom-like talent and the wool of his wonderfully chosen words.
Annalisse, the prophesied Child of Hope, has been missing for seventeen years. Alain, her twin brother, believes she is being held captive by a man named Malkarian. The day after his eighteenth birthday, Alain sets out to find Annalisse only to learn that prophecies and people are seldom what they appear to be.
The Child of Hope is, as mentioned earlier, Australian author Gary Stowe's first novel. It opens The Masteries, a new sequence published by Dragonfall Press, and if it serves as a harbinger of things to come, readers of epic fantasy have a great deal to look forward to.
Paperback: 501 pages
Publisher: Dragonfall Press; 2011
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0-9806341-8-1
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