Road of the Lost
Nafiza Azad
Intimate High Fantasy
The publisher's blurb for Road of the Lost begins, "Perfect for fans of The Cruel Prince, ..." I get where they're coming from. In Black's Folk of the Air trilogy an apparently powerless young girl contends with powerful fae enemies. When I read the Folk of the Air trilogy (which I admired greatly), my first thought was, "Wow! This is young adult? It's DARK." And yes, Road of the Lost is dark.
But I felt Road of the Lost was more like a different story: Tamsyn Muir's emergent Locked Tomb series. Coming from me, this is high praise, as I think Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth are utterly brilliant.
Croi, the first-person narrator of Road of the Lost is a small, weak creature, a brownie, who finds herself magically compelled to leave the home where she has lived all her life. It transpires that Croi is not a brownie at all, but something else. She has been under a spell to make her appear to be a brownie. That spell is unraveling as she travels, putting her in grave danger. Her struggles to find and understand her identity and the identities of her enemies and companions felt to me very like Gideon and Harrow's stories.
Unlike Locked Tomb, however, Road of the Lost is High Fantasy -- that is, it is about glorious and glamorous fairy kings and princesses who wield powerful magic. Like most High Fantasy worlds, this one is backed by a body of Legend from its past. But Croi does something I don't remember ever to have seen in High Fantasy before: she questions the Legend. She asks, "Where did you hear that story? How do you know the ones who told it to you were telling the truth? Cui bono? Did they have something to gain?" (Croi doesn't say, "Cui bono?"-- I am paraphrasing.) Croi's dangerous journey is all about learning, not just about herself, but about the nature of power in her world.
The result is a kind of intimacy I don't remember to have encountered in High Fantasy before. The kings and princesses are powerful and magical and glamorous, but they are also flawed. Inside themselves there is a kind of grubbiness, a weakness and decay that Croi's questioning cuts through.
Thank you to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster Canada for an advanced reader copy. Road of the Lost to be released 18-Oct-2022.