# Songs of the Earth by Elspeth Cooper



## Werthead (Mar 11, 2011)

Condemned  to be burned as a witch for the heresy of using sorcery, young  Gair is surprised when his life is spared by a whim of the Preceptor.  Exiled from his homeland, Gair is taken into the care of Alderan, a man  on the lookout for those with Gair's talents. Alderan takes Gair to a  place of safety where he can learn to control his powers, but there are  those within the Church who are not mollified by the Preceptor's pardon  and have sent their witchfinders to track Gair down.

For  himself, Preceptor Ansel is old and failing, near the end of his life.  But before his time is done, he hopes to unveil a secret about the  Endirion Church which will change everything...

_Songs of the Earth_ is the debut novel by Elspeth Cooper, the first in *The Wild Hunt Trilogy*. It's a traditional secondary world fantasy with a number of interesting flourishes which rise it above the pack.

At  first glance there is little new or surprising about the novel, which  is firmly in the standard epic fantasy mould. Young orphan hero of  uncertain birth (though there's some nice genre-nodding jokes about  that), a magical academy, romance, elves (sort of) and so on. The  academy stuff recalls _The Name of the Wind_  (in a good way) whilst the notion of magic as a song is  intriguingly-handled, but again unoriginal. Characterisation is solid  and somewhat more subtle than first expected. Gair is the typical young  hero protagonist, but he goes through some interesting and somewhat  traumatic developments which start making him harder-edged and more  ruthless. Alderan is pretty much the standard 'old wizard mentor'  character, though amusingly tilted slightly more towards Bayaz than  Belgarad. And so on.

What is interesting is that a number of the  major characters are handicapped in some way: Gair is branded and  recovering from torture and trauma; Ansel is old, infirm and suffering  from a lung disease; Darin has diabetes; and Aysha has two crippled  legs, but her shapeshifting skills enable her to avoid her disability  for a few hours per day. Cooper doesn't beat the reader over the head  with this (in fact I was halfway through the book before noting it), but  it's interesting and all-too-rare to see handicapped and infirm  characters depicted in a fantasy novel, with disabled issues viewed  though the lens of a world where magic exists (but its healing  properties have limits). It's not a huge deal, but it's an interesting  minor theme that Cooper develops subtly through the book.

Elsewhere  the plot develops nicely, the magic is intriguingly high-end (after a  number of gritty, low-magic works it's good to see people throwing up  fortress-enveloping shields or creating entire storms from scratch) and  the characters work well. On the minus side, it's nothing we haven't  seen before.

_Songs of the Earth_  (***½) is a solid debut novel with plenty of promise but, as this  stage, not a huge amount of originality. It will be published on 16 June  2011 in the UK and imports should be available in the USA.


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