Orphans of Chaos, by John C. Wright

I found this book due to a post at fantasybookspot.com (read their review here). I thought with a rating of 9 that it might be worth reading.

I found the premise interesting (once I knew enough to know what it was - we only discover things as the main protagonist discovers them). The pacing was a little slow all through the book - not much seems to happen the entire time (though that could be because I am so used to reading YA fiction :-)). Things jump around a bit at the beginning and it did take me a while to get my head into things - once the story got going, however, I found myself enjoying the characters and their approach to their problems.

There is a lot of fairly in depth mythology, physics/math and philosophy - which I found interesting, though I admit much of it went right over my head. I'm not sure who his target audience is - the book is sized and covered like a lot of YA fiction, and the protagonist is a teenage girl, but the mythology, religion and physics is pretty hefty stuff.

I enjoyed the world that the author has created, with its different paradigms of reality and how the characters' powers arise from these differences. I like the mythological aspect of many of its characters - I've always liked Greek/Roman and Celtic mythology, and there's plenty there to satisfy. It was, however, a little confusing that every character seemed to have at least 2 names, and many had more - some of them I was familiar with, like Mars, but some I wasn't (for example I did not know that Mavors was another name for Mars or that Cyprian was another name for Aphrodite). The book could have benefited with one of those cast of characters at the back, listing all the names of each character!

Orphans of Chaos is not your stereotypical fantasy book - though there are definitely elements of it there (the orphaned teens who slowly discover they are not who they have been told they are ... and it turns out that they are far from ordinary and have a pivotal role in the fate of the cosmos). However, the style in which it is written seems more like a lot of the harder science fiction I have read, with bits of science, philosophy and mythology all mixed in together - a satisfying milieu!

To finalize a rather scattered review ... despite the slow beginning, I enjoyed this book! Much more by the end than I thought I would by the middle :-). We'll see how the rest of the trilogy develops (Fugitives of Chaos, and Titans of Chaos - both are already available). Maybe with all the introduction out of the way things will proceed more apace.