Read All About It: Imager's Challenge

L. E. Modesitt, Jr.'s Imager's Challenge is the second book of The Imager Portfolio, and builds up its fantasy universe to towering heights. With more responsibilities, greater intrigue, and more powerful characters, this novel strikes the balance between his characters and their abilities.

We return to the intricate fantasy world with Rhennthyl, now working as imager liaison to the Civic Patrol of L'Excelsis. This means that Rhenn is now dealing with more dangerous situations daily, ranging from regular thugs to even the High Holders of Solidar. His growing imaging skills are nothing to be scoffed at, and Rhenn's tendency to know truth before he has proof is getting him in trouble with people on all sides.

Meanwhile, tragedy has befallen his family, and he must lean more on his intended's family in order to make it through these hardships alive and whole. Rhenn must also make alliances outside of his chosen families, and must decide who he can trust and who he must not trust--ending up with an unexpected ally.

Modesitt, Jr.'s work focuses most of his efforts on building up his world from the smallest details, even its food. However, this creates a lack in certain areas, because where he is focused on showing us how his world is different from our own (steam, food, and especially the magic) it means he is less focused on implanting the narrative and plot within traceable efforts to build this novel into more than a mere exercise in describing minutia. Despite this fault, the novel is still good, and I have high hopes for the rest of the series.

Modesitt, Jr.'s writing is very, very dense. Almost everything is described in immaculate detail, including the food, and if you believe he has skimped on the detail somewhere, it is likely that he will return to that subject later, if only to describe it further, as something Rhenn might have missed. In this way, I found this novel more pretentious than the last. Rhenn is consistently bested only by his superiors, while he himself is superior to all of his foes with minimal effort. Admittedly, I didn't think he would accomplish his goals with the minimal amount of bloodshed he managed, and it was still a plausible scene. Overall, the pretensions of this novel are still firmly held in check by the boundaries of check and balances on each power in the novels, be it Imagers, High Holders, or factors.

A slightly picky thing: I didn't like the cover of this one as much as I enjoyed the last one. I felt like the first cover really expressed a major part of the novel, but this cover just confused me, and made Rhenn look more average than I pictured (I actually picture him with Asian heritage), and the cover doesn't point to a specific battle that Rhenn faces.

This novel addressed women much better than the last. Modesitt, Jr. makes it clear that the entire conflict that surrounded the last two novels was won by the women who controlled the strings all along. This is an important distinction, and shows that Rhenn may have been a significant player, but he was only a knight in this game of chess--the Queen was much more important, on both sides.