March to Other Worlds Day 25: The Valens Legacy by Jan Stryvant
Day 25: The Valens Legacy by Jan Stryvant
As the March to Other Worlds enters its final week this year, I want to turn our attention back into the realm of urban fantasy and The Valens Legacy. At its heart, The Valens Legacy is about a poor college student who discovers rather painfully that his dead father was a powerful enchanter and that wizards and lycanthropes are real. Suddenly transformed into a werelion, Sean must uncover the secret work that got his father killed or face a similar fate. But his father wasn’t just an enchanter, he was a revolutionary trying to figure out how to end the enslavement of lycanthropes by wizards and Sean finds that he must pick up both his father’s life work as both a crusade and a necessity for survival.
These books are a lot of fun. Their plots are decently well thought out and there is plenty of action. It takes a few books, but the magical system finally begins to make enough sense to carry the series, and if at times it seems as if Sean became werelion just so that Stryvant could “justify” him sleeping with a large number of women who all marry him and never suffer a moment of jealousy toward each other, the plot is generally strong enough to push us past these moments.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only reason Sean became a werelion. Lions are the gods of the lycanthrope community and Sean is almost a messiah for them, taking on the role of liberator. The storyline is great, but it involves a very large number and type of lycanthropes filling the pages of the story and it slowly dawned on me that all of the lycanthropes felt exactly the same. In fact, become a werecreature starts to feel more like putting on a shirt than changing painfully into a beast whenever the full moon is out or a character’s emotions get the best of them. Great urban fantasies have humans cursed with lycanthropy struggle with their beasts. They aren’t truly human anymore. And that struggle is an important part of the genre that is totally lacking in this series and it annoys me on some level each time I read one of the 17 volumes. It’s not a series breaker, but I do think it keeps the books from becoming one of the great urban fantasy series. That’s a real shame because Stryvant has some very good ideas that he plays within in these pages.
