The Magic in Storm Siren
For this, the first day of the blog tour, I’d like to touch upon the subject of the magic in the book ‘Storm Siren’. Many Christians have a certain degree of concern with magic in fantasy fiction. If the magic in such fiction is too close to the ‘real’ magic as practiced by occultists and modern-day witches, Wiccans and Neopagans, the fear is that such fantasy fiction might lead the young and/or naive to experiment with occultist magic.
The magic in Storm Siren, however, is different. The main character, Nym, was born with her Elemental curse/gift. She receives training, not to learn how to cast magic spells, but to learn to control the Elemental power she was born with. Specifically, so she is no longer in danger of killing other people without meaning to.
This is rather similar to the mind-magic gifts in the Valdemar series by Mercedes Lackey, and the laran gifts in the Darkover series by Marion Zimmer Bradley. In both of these series, some people are born with magic or magic-seeming gifts which must be trained, for the safety both of the gifted person and those around that person.
Some Christians may reject this based on the idea that God would never burden innocent children by having them born with dangerous mental gifts of this kind. But I don’t believe this is an accurate argument. In the fallen world we live in, children are born with many burdens— born with birth defects, as a conjoined twin, into an impoverished or abusive family— I think we can accept a fantasy world in which other, fictional types of burdens are imposed on some unfortunate people.
The Blog Tour
This post is a part of the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy blog tour. As a member of the blog tour I’m told I have to insert a disclaimer into this post. Here it is: In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
If anyone thinks getting a free book will bribe me into giving a good review, they just don’t know me very well. If the book had utterly sucked swamp water I would have had a fine time picking it to pieces. Sadly, however, the book failed to suck said swamp water which takes all the fun out the whole thing for me. 😉
Anyway, here are the basic links for the tour. Do be sure and ‘like’ the author’s Facebook page.
Storm Siren – http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Siren-Trilogy/dp/1401690343/
Author Website – http://www.maryweber.com/
Author Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/marychristineweber
And here are the other participants in the tour. It’s always interesting to see what the others have to say about a given book— the tour members, as a group, are a lot more articulate than the average Amazon.com book reviewer, so the reviews are quite worth reading.
Julie Bihn
Lauren Bombardier
Beckie Burnham
Vicky DealSharingAunt
George Duncan
April Erwin
Carol Gehringer
Victor Gentile
Ryan Heart
Timothy Hicks
Janeen Ippolito
Carol Keen
Emileigh Latham
Simone Lilly-Egerter
Jennette Mbewe
Shannon McDermott
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Jalynn Patterson
Audrey Sauble
Chawna Schroeder
Jojo Sutis
Steve Trower
Phyllis Wheeler
Michelle R. Wood
My Antimatter Life 