To Chart the Clouds (Legend of the Five Rings) – Review

To Chart the Clouds (Legend of the Five Rings)

Evan Dicken

Aconyte Books

Reviewers Note: I need to start with an apology. This is the first book review I’ve written in nearly 18 months and it’s going to be a lot shorter than the reviews I’ve traditionally written. This took a long while to complete, and I’m still far from the good place I was back in early 2022; if and when I get future reviews written, they’re going to be shorter and less detailed than before, until I can hopefully get back into the swing of things. Hopefully you can bear with me while I get going again.

But now to the subject of this review!

I’ve been looking forward to reading and reviewing this book for a very long time. More than a year, in fact; I had just started reading the physical review copy Aconyte Books kindly sent to me when my life abruptly took a downward turn, everything imploded and I spent the next 18 months picking up the pieces. But even when things were at their worst, To Chart the Clouds was still there in the back of my head as an intrigue and as something I desperately wanted to finish reading. There were a few reasons for that which, combined together, made it the first book I was determined to review when I got back onto this blog.

The first was the absolutely gorgeous cover art – the artist isn’t listed, but whoever made this piece has a rare talent for illustration. The lush, rolling grasslands leading down into a tree-lined valley with scrub-lined mountains towering above it is an instantly-iconic image, one that stayed with me long after putting the book on a shelf and promising one day to come back to it. That imagery is aided by some well-chosen font for the book title, not to mention the intriguing subtitle ‘A Secret War Rages in a Lost Valley’. The second was the author: Evan Dicken greatly impressed me with his debut, the Warhammer novella The Red Hours, which almost single-handedly made me interested in the Age of Sigmar setting. After finishing the novella, I noted his name and put it on my short-list of authors I’d readily review in the future; I’m gutted that I’ve missed the stories he’s published more recently and look forward to reviewing them in turn.

Thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – was the back-cover blurb for the novel. I absolutely love it when authors take an I.P. setting and then turn it around and shake it a bit and find a way to approach it that’s novel and original; and Dicken delivers this in spades, with a story that focuses on a junior member of the Imperial Cartographic Bureau tasked with travelling to the distant Spine of the World and both uncovering and then successfully mapping a hidden valley desired by a multitude of squabbling and lethal Clans. I was immediately grabbed by that description and the possibilities for plot, characters and worldbuilding it raised, and as such I couldn’t wait to jump in and see what Evan Dicken had in store for me.

The novel’s story follows Miya Isami, junior clerk in the Imperial Cartographic Bureau who aspires to become a fully-trained Cartographer like her parents and travel the length and breadth of the Empire, drawing maps and discovering new and mysterious lands. Although talented, a combination of bad luck and poor timing leads to her failing her final assessment and she believes her chance to become a Cartographer lost – perhaps forever. But a chance discover of a set of ancient, half-forgotten maps in the depths of an archive provide her with an opportunity: one that could either make her career in the Bureau, or see killed on the far-flung edges of the Empire. Miya is a fantastic character who acts as the perfect protagonist for this kind of story – in which Dicken takes the standard Legend of the Five Rings narrative structure and looks at it in a slightly different and unusual way, as well as a few brisk shakes to see what might unexpectedly fall out as our junior map-maker is forced to deal with unyielding bureaucrats, inscrutable politicians and dangerous warriors as she finds the fate of an entire region in her hands – whether she wants it to be or not. It’s an engrossing read that I managed to finish in a few short days once I was able to focus on it properly, and undoubtedly one of the finest books to be published by Aconyte Books in the Legend of the Five Rings range. I really cannot recommend it enough.

On a purely personal note, I don’t think I could have asked for a better book to inspire me to begin reading and reviewing titles again. Dicken’s prose is assured and engaging; his characters are well-realised, three-dimensional people that emerge fully formed from the novel’s pages; the world-building is exquisite and obviously carefully-planned; and the plot itself flows perfectly from chapter to chapter without any wasted words or irrelevant sub-plots. Dicken obviously has a great love for both cartography as a subject, and the Legend of the Five Rings, and he forges them together to create a memorable and engaging novel. Dicken is clearly a natural fit for the Legend of the Five Rings setting, and I cannot wait to see what he comes up with next. You can be sure I’ll be reviewing his next novel from Aconyte Books as soon as I can.

Test