Reading Response: The Warrior Heir

A few weeks ago, I was charged to visit the teen lit. section of a bookstore and pick out a book that appealed to me. I bounced around a bit and eventually walked out with The Warrior Heir by Cinda Williams Chima. To summarize, Jack is a pretty average 16 year-old in a small Ohio town who finds out that he's descended from a race of magical people--wizards and such. He's a warrior, his mom doesn't know, his caretaker's a wizard, his aunt's an enchantress, and he has as much trouble following it all as I'm having explaining it. With this revelation, Jack not only has to deal with new knowledge about himself and many people he knows, but also with new characters in his life who may or may not be trustworthy. He's being hunted by wizards from both of the two warring houses (White Rose and Red Rose), who either want him to fight under their flag in "The Game," a battle to the death between two warriors that determines which house will retain power until the next game, or who want to kill him so he can't fight. Meanwhile, his friends and family are trying to keep him out of the game, the new assistant principle is training him to fight, and he's trying to keep his secret from his mother and best friends.

If I were a teenager, I would have liked this book a lot more--except that this is not at all the kind of book I liked to read when I was a teenager. Unlike the Harry Potter series (which I have not read), Chima's "Heir" books (there are three: The Warrior Heir, The Wizard Heir, and The Dragon Heir) don't so much transport readers to a new universe existing alongside their own reality as they pull at the possibility of an unknown, magical undercurrent to our reality. That being the case, this book deals with a teenager's struggle to accept a new dimension of self-knowledge and to somehow balance his two lives--to study for school and learn wizard magic, to practice for soccer and for battle, to keep his friends from asking too many questions even after they see him dig up a sword in a graveyard and shoot fire from it. The writing is not overly florid or hard to swallow--teen readers should have no problem with it--and the story has plenty of suspense, plot twists, and adventure. When I came into the last few chapters of the book, after a certain plot revelation that I'll not disclose, I found myself eager for the end, both because I was kind of tired of reading the book and because I wanted to see how Jack would solve this latest challenge.

Perhaps for teenagers who'd like to imagine an extra layer of excitement in their own lives, this kind of fantasy works. For myself, I think I prefer wizards and warriors in their own places and times, without the distractions of modern teenage life--or soccer, which is far from my favorite sport and got plenty of spotlight in this book. My "sword and sorcery" archetype is Robert E. Howard's Conan, of course, who is the opposite of Jack: a savage barbarian and natural to combat who navigates through civilization by wit and instinct while having little use for social conventions. I doubt that I'll be reading the other books in the series, but that definitely would not stop me from recommending this one to a teen reader as an accessible, imaginative adventure story.

Also, it could have used a few dragons.