a review by Jade Hounsell
Chronicles of the tree book one
WOW! I cannot believe that I have never heard of Mary Victoria before I received Tymon’s Flight. I was totally blown away by it but when it came down to sitting and writing this review I got to thinking what happened in this book to make me like it so much? In all truth while there were a few major events I couldn’t think of why that would have had me so enthralled, then I realized it wasn’t the big events that caught my attention the most, it was all the little things and things that you thought were of no consequence at the time coming back later on and fitting in so nicely.
Mary gives us so much information and back-story as she goes along that there are no questions as to why things are as they are.
Anyways, part of the blurb on the back says
‘The World Tree rises up out of the seething clouds like a green mountain. All creation nestles in its green branches. There is no world besides this one…or so the people believe.’ So if you don’t quite get what that means, to put it simply is that these people live in a great tree, there is nothing else except other settlements on other branches, reached by air-ships, nobody knows what is above the canopy and what is below the cloud cover of the lower branches.
As the book is called Tymon’s Flight you can guess that the main character is called Tymon, a young teen who has grown up in a seminary in the town called Argos. Tymon was left on the steps of the seminary when he was a baby and as he is approaching the end of his schooling he is left with the decision to become a priest or to work for two years bound to the priests if he is not apprenticed out to a wealthy merchant whom is willing to pay for his schooling costs. Becoming a priest does not appeal to Tymon at all as he has always had questions as to the teachings of the priests religion, believing that there is more than what they believe and not everything they saw as ‘evil’ or ‘impure’ really is.
After a series of events, including Tymon questioning a priests’ festival where a pilgrim throws themselves into a rift in the tree, talking to another ‘pilgrim’ which is prohibited to novices and encouraging an old ‘mad’ scientist to make an ‘unnatural’ propelled air-ship, Tymon is banished to the drought ridden colony Marak to work for another priest.
Once in Marak, Tymon finds himself ostracized by the local population. While he has more free time due to the priest that he works for either being drunk or high, he has nothing to do and no one to talk to. It really is no surprise that Tymon stumbles upon some hidden agendas and plots by the city’s rulers and the priests. So Tymon takes the information he has and falls in with a group of rebels (mainly because he finds himself falling for one of their priestesses, Samiha) and then has to make some hard decisions on what he wants to do with his life. ‘Fighting for freedom and power is not so enticing when it may mean betraying his own people and severing all ties to the world he knows…’
Once again I cannot express how much I enjoyed this book and am looking forward to reading the other two in the series as well as any future books written by Mary Victoria.
