ROGUE WAVE: THE REVIEW

TSARNO UNIVERSITY PRESS

presents

ROGUE WAVE: THE REVIEW

HERE BE DRAGONS. SERIOUSLY.

Today I have finally got my impatient hands on Waterfire Saga 2, Rogue Wave (Olas Salvajes), freshly published in Spain. The book is mostly Neela-centric, with the life of the party getting tangled up in bureaucratic hell, then locked up in her bedroom by overprotective parents who think she has gone insane (from bad to worse), then performing a great escape to trick a couple of guard dragons away from her talisman (We count on you, Neel!)... So nearly no Astrid, but Neels getting into scrapes and becoming more and more serious.

Aside from the fact that the fortress community of Tsarno has got a university (changing headcanon of Tsarno from typical outpost to something like Leipzig or Ingolstadt...). At last the typical hinterland/provincial university, like in so many other real-life realms (Oxbridge, Leipzig, Uppsala, Ingolstadt itself...)!

And the story of Orfeo (yes, like THAT Orpheus), Astrid's ancestor. SPOILER ALERT for those who haven't read the novel!!!
So this dashing and good-natured healer fell in love and married happily. What was her name...? Euri something...? No, it was Alma. Which means "soul", conveniently.
Anyway... All was well. But one day, his wife, the light of his life, died.
So Orfeo was crushed by her loss, and even went insane (I mean, I know Lady Tremaine, Maria Theresa, Mary Eleanor, Archibald Craven, Robert Baratheon, anyone else left brokenhearted by the death of their respective partners...). And he made a decision that changed the destiny of all the worlds.
So, did he descend to the underworld to parley with its rulers...?
NO.
Orfeo tried to resurrect his beloved Alma, in spite of what others had to say against it. Like Frankenstein.
Obviously, she came back wrong...
And this was Orfeo's start of darkness.

What's more, omnivoxa Ling, taken prisoner and tied and gagged by evil overlord Rafe Iaoro Mfeme, gets to know from her captor what his true identity is by reading the letters of his name, that he scrambles:

RAFE IAORO MFEME -> I AM ORFEO, FEAR ME

So it was an anagram alias just like TOM MARVOLO RIDDLE, eh?
It also reminded me of Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events, whose name I recognized in playwright AL FUNCOOT, doctor O. LUCAFONT, et cetera. Anagram aliases, like sinister theatre and pictures of eyes, are a sign of identity for this character. 

Seeing Neela grow a spine and change from the comic relief of the first book to a no-nonsense determinator. And what does it take to change her?

Oodles of red tape, a pair of overprotective parents (who think that she seriously needs some seclusion), and a nanny confidante just like Juliet Capulet's (but Suma still treats Neel like a child) who cannot avoid that her ward is placed behind bars because it's best for poor Neela... After staging a lucky escape, she has a talisman to find... a dragon egg. Yes, like Dany's. The Empire of Matali prides itself on these beasts as much as the Targaryens. The coat of arms is, on a red field, a razormouth dragon rampant clutching its blue egg. Dragons are bred by the dozen as beasts of burden, as pets, steeds, and weapons. Razormouth dragons are used by the Matalin Army as both weapons and mounts. Yes, war dragons, another echo of our friends the Targs. The blue egg in the empire's arms is the only one of its colour (all others are brown), a national treasure, and belongs to the razormouth queen Hagarla.

In the region of Kandina (near Madagascar), a vassal state of the Matalin Empire ruled by vassal lady Kora, on the outskirts of the main village of Nzuri Bonde, all razormouths in the realm are bred. It becomes Neela's mission to reach Kandina, earn Kora's trust and that of her personal guards the Askari in Nzuri Bonde, and get her own hands on the blue dragon egg...

I found it great to add more worldbuilding in the form of afro counterpart culture Kandina. There is a coming of age ritual that teens, on their sixteenth birthday, shall swim through a gauntlet of razormouths. And it is a matter of life or death... literally: become an adult or die. Neels is determined to pass such a fearsome test... Isn't she brave?

Sera and Blu embark on a quest to find the blue diamond of shipwrecked sixteenth-century Castilian infanta Maria Theresa, a daughter of Philip II attacked and killed by pirates en route for her French marriage of state. What's more... the wreck is off the Mediterranean coast of Saintes-Maries, in southern France. From there, Blu and Sera make their way to Cap de Creus, "a rocky outcropping of land near Spain's border with France" to quote the text, then to a farmhouse on the outskirts of a village off the Costa Brava. The farm belongs to a couple called Carlos and Elena Aleta Roja, loyalists of the Resistance (A Spanish wife taking her husband's surnames? That seems truly strange...), where the two young mer-royals are married by Rafael, the local magistrate. 

When one reads a story taking place in one's own homelands (in this case, the eastern coast of Spain), there is something magical about the setting. It's as if these characters had been closer to you than ever...

Plus, the name of the Asian pirate captain who shot Maria Theresa when she resisted his attempts to rape her was Amarrefe Mei Foo... "Amarrefe" sounds pretty strange, and again, those are the letters of...

AMARREFE MEI FOO -> I AM ORFEO, FEAR ME

Another Significant Anagram alias of Orfeo! I wonder if all the Big Bads in this saga, being incarnations of Orfeo, will have names with the same letters in other combinations... It's just like when it comes to Count Olaf!!! It also reminded me of Count Olaf in A Series of Unfortunate Events, whose name I recognized in playwright AL FUNCOOT, doctor O. LUCAFONT, et cetera. Anagram aliases, like sinister theatre and pictures of eyes, are a sign of identity for this character. 

Plus, we got more info on Ondalina, that Nordic realm of lore and strength...

- Ondalinian military employs firing squad as its favourite execution method for important prisoners of war.

- Death riders (those death riders in black uniforms riding black steeds) are not professional Ondalinian troops, but mercenaries/soldiers of fortune. 

- There are, in Ondalina, the Scandinavian kind of kelpie: the Näkki (Finnish name of these beings), murderous shapeshifters who live in caves in the northern Atlantic. 

- And also some kind of perilous arctic beings called EisGeists (Eis-Geister or Eisgeister would be more correct German!). So far, I may suppose they're ice ghosts. The Spanish translation calls them "espíritus de hielo", ice spirits, missing the German loanword.

- There are four distinct tribes of Kobolds (Germanic goblins): Höllenbläser (glassblowers), Feuerkumpel (miners who excavate lava pipes in the rock and extract lava for lava torches), Meerteufel (devilish, I imagine), and Ekelschmutz (nauseatingly filthy, I imagine): all of them with speaking German names. We have also seen what at least Feuerkumpeln look like: muscular and broad-shouldered, with powerful and strong legs, wielding medieval weapons like axes, pikes, and flails. Two nostrils but no nose (Voldemort-like), transparent eyes, lipless mouths full of sharp teeth, and ears mangled or torn off from fighting. What do the other kinds of Kobolds look like? (Shudders.)

- The language of Ondalina/Ondalinian is actually Norwegian. Kobolds say loudly: "Gå tilbake!" (Go back!), "Tilbake!" (Back!) "Heie høyere!" (Cheer louder!), "Heie, dårer! For du blir Kobold-kjøtt!" (Cheer, fools! Before you become goblin meat!). Any Swedish speaker can understand both spoken and written Norwegian, the only differences being the accent, the spelling, and a few lexical shibboleths. 

Though this book is diagnosed with chronic lack of Astrid Kolfinnsdottir, there are all of these features to make Rogue Wave a memorable read, enough to keep me entertained until Dark Tide comes in December.