Review: Wheels of Fire

Because nothing much has happened since my last post, I think I shall take a little break and write a review of the book I just finished, "Wheels of Fire." This book was given to me years ago by a friend for my birthday, but I never got around to reading it until now. It's in an omnibus with another book, "When the Bough Breaks, " titled "The Other World. " To be truthful, I strayed away from this book partially because of the description on the back cover and the tagline on the front: "Hot Rods and High Magic to the Rescue." Both of these seem to imply some sort of fusion between a story about elves and a story about car racing, which frankly sounded a bit stupid. But as I read the book I discovered that it's better than I was expecting.

The book is by Mercedes Lackey (who is one of those authors I keep seeing in the bookstores but have never read) and Mark Shepard, and concerns the adventures of an elf named Alinor ("Al" for short) and his human friend Bob. Elves in the world of this story moved to the Americas to get away from encroaching humans and the iron used to build their civilizations, which makes the elves sick. However, elves also have great concerns for abused children, and have a tendency to take them away from abusive parents to either live "Underhill" (in the otherworldly realms of the elves) or raised by human foster parents friendly to the elves. Bob is a grown up example of these children. For some reason that I couldn't quite understand (there were two books in this series before this book, and perhaps they can explain better) elves and some of their human allies have gotten together a racecar-building company, called SERRA, which seems to specialize in building engines out of aluminum (since elves of course couldn't work with iron to make steel engines).

So that's the setup we're given to the story, with Al and Bob working on their engine on a racetrack in Oklahoma. Into their life comes Cindy, a young mother from Georgia whose ex-husband has run off with her son, Jamie. Jim, the ex-husband, had joined a cultish white supremacist and seperatist fundamentalist Christian sect called the Chosen Ones. Cindy has been able to track Jamie to Oklahoma, but has lost track of him. Al, because of his fondness for rescuing children, decides to help.

Meanwhile, the head of the Chosen Ones, Brother Joseph, is planning to use Jamie as a medium to contact a mysterious entity he refers to as the Holy Fire, which tells him how to make money off the lottery and selling drugs. Brother Joseph's son, Joe, is losing faith in his father's movement, and Jamie himself is being contacted by the ghost of a girl named Sarah, who used to fulfill Jamie's role, before she was murdered.

This book was actually surprisingly well written. The Chosen Ones, whilst being obviously the antagonists, are not cackling evil masterminds, but instead misguided people that have gone so far around the bender that they truly believe building a compound out in the middle of nowhere and stocking up on guns for when the US government inevitably will raid it. They are not cartoon villains, whilst still being believably evil. I also like how the various "Good Guys" (Al, Joe, Sarah, the local sheriff, Cindy, and Jamie) don't always agree as to what should be done, and sometimes act at cross purposes to one another. There are several scenes later in the book, for instance, where Sarah is downright cruel to Joe, who she partially blames for her death.

Joe as a character is probably my favorite. He is conflicted and truly changes over the course of the book. When the reader first meets him, it appears that he might even be a villain, but he undergoes much thinking on what his father has done and will do. He is the most human of all the characters, imperfect and yet totally sympathetic.

However, this book has several problems. One of them is the presence of Al and the background that goes with him. It's not in the story enough to really matter to the story, and seems oddly out of place for a story about trying to rescue a little boy from a deranged cult and the dark force manipulating it. Except for a chapter explaining Al's relationship to the mysterious dark creature controlling the cult (one of my favorite parts of the book, by the way), Al and the rest of the book seem to be in two separate universes. Lackey seems to have included him and his elven background to tie this story to a previous series of books, and to allow Al to be an almost Mary-Sueish source of power and ability, which is another problem. Despite Al needing to be careful around the iron gates of the Chosen Ones' compound, and trying to be care so as to avoid alerting the evil creature controlling the cult, he seems to triumph effortlessly over anything the antagonists can throw at him, all without them ever realizing he even exists.

A final problem for me was the character of Jim, Jamie's father. Although we are told that he used to be a good and loving man, before the book starts he has become a drunk, a white supremacist, and a bully. And yet he never seems to be more than a dupe to me, as opposed to a willfully evil person, like Brother Joseph or his lackey Luke. He didn't seem evil, just deceived. I was puzzled how the character I read about could have ever been a good person, while simultaneously finding it difficult to really consider him to be a villain. This was made even more frustrating by the fact that Lackey and Shepard obviously seemed to think of him as an antagonist.

So, all in all, the book was alright, being an entertaining read while simultaneously having serious issues that I could not reconcile. We will see whether "When the Bough Breaks" is any better.

David

PS look to see a post of my adventures from today later on. I wasn't expecting to have an adventure today, but I did. I'll tell it soon