I have a huge respect for all authors, but I have to give extra props to writers of fantasy and science fiction. Where do those worlds come from? How do you create visions of depth and detail from nothing? I haven’t the foggiest, because I’ve never created like that, but it can’t be easy. Because it’s difficult and unavoidable in such a circular genre, I’m not surprised that speculative fiction almost always has similarities to older works. It’s not plagiarism; it’s inspiration.

Ms. Bast’s fantasy venture has clear antecedents (purposeful or otherwise) in various sources, but the biggest one is the archetypal fantasy setup that pervades the genre, to wit, the sword-and-sorcery “Rebels vs. Bad Guy.” Bad Guy is Hero’s uncle who murdered Hero’s family to take the throne himself (*coughHamletcough*). Hero now has a band of sober followers (not much humor in this book), and comes across Heroine, who’s from a conquered territory and needs to find a sorcerer who’s her other half, get a key, and steal Bad Guy’s magic book. Then she and the sorcerer will be able to join forces (magic and otherwise), and their combined magic mojo will pervade the land and kick Bad Guy in the nuts.

Like that’s anything new. But okay, that’s not the point, because fantasy is hard, right? And writing is hard. Besides, Ms. Bast has 300 pages to cover what would take your average dime-store high fantasist a good 1500 pages over three volumes. But the restricted page count cuts out a lot of world-building and leave the interesting bits to molder away in neglect.

And even cutting the author some slack in the originality department, I can only say that the rest of Raven’s Quest is average. The writing is a hodgepodge of high fantasy-talk and 21st-century Manhattan – and it’s average. The characters are not only average, they are also generic. I cannot think of anything that distinguishes Hero and Heroine from the thousands of other nameless fantasy heroes and heroines sitting on millions of shelves across the world.

The exceptions to the mediocrity are Bad Guy Magnus (gee, doesn’t his name just reek of evil), whose relationship with the captured sorceress Nia has hints of becoming very interesting. I wish the author had focused on them. I wish the author had more pages, or less ambition, or both. I wish for world peace. Clearly, that hasn’t happened.