Book Review: Tanya Huff's Into the Broken Lands

 Into the Broken Lands, by Tanya Huff (DAW)

Tanya Huff is a seasoned, multi-genre author whose worknever ceases to amaze me with its sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and sheer drama.She’s as prolific as she is versatile, both with her many long-running seriesand her stand-alone novels. Into the Broken Lands introduces acompletely new world and characters. The set-up is familiar to fantasy readers:generations ago, mages intoxicated by their own limitless powers shattered thelaws of nature and reality, resulting in their own demise and a landscape ofmagical impossibilities, The Broken Lands. Since then, the royal heirs ofMarsan, greatest of the surviving human realms, venture into The Broken Landsin search of the fuel for an ever-burning flame and their own legitimacy asrulers.

Here, Huff does something both challenging and brilliant:she weaves together two such journeys, one in the present and the other, acouple of generations ago. At first, the two seem disjoint, the past being nomore than prolog to the present. As the two sets of characters venture deeperinto the perilous Broken Lands, both similarities and differences echo andbuild on one another. Eventually, the fate of the earlier expedition shapes thepresent, and the present offers redemption for what has come before. Theunifying elements include records kept by the first expedition, taken as reverentialgospel, and the discovery of how scholars have selectively edited them,horrendous dangers that are repeated with unpredictable variations, and asingle character: the sole surviving weapon of the mages, without which no heircan reach the source of the fuel and return safely. Only the weapon isn’t athing, an “it;” the weapon is a person, a giant rock-like female warrior whohad been enslaved and imprisoned until a healer, a member of the first party,saw her as a person.

Into the Broken Lands is understandably character-fueled,although there is plenty of action, escalating tension, and mystery in thestory. At its core, however, the story allows us to examine key questions. Whatis a person—and how does one become a person? What is the redemptive power oflove? What is the role of knowledge and is there such a thing as knowledge freefrom ethics? While an entertaining story filled with bizarre magic andcompelling characters, it is at its heart a story of love and grief. Exceptionallywell done!