Fiction Reviews
Fateless
(2025) Julie Kagawa, HQ, £20, hrdbk, 391pp, ISBN 978-0-008-73737-5
This is one of those fantasy novels that I suspect will tick most of the boxes for fans. You could almost see a checklist of the characteristics. Sparrow is a young woman (tick) whose family at the beginning of the novel is the Thieves Guild she belongs to (tick). In the desert city of Kovass. She is mentored by an older man, Vahn, who is the Guildmaster of the Guild (tick). When she agrees to take part in a job that will earn her adult membership of the Guild. In doing so Sparrow discovers a major secret that means she will travel across the sands of the Dune Sea, to a tomb where her employers are determined to bring back The Deathless King from a group of godlike sorcerers who once ruled the planet. His arrival will have global consequences.
Anyone who has read other fantasy novels may recognise plot elements here. Here there’s some nice discussions about duty, loyalty and the meaning of Fate, which has significance in this world along the way, but it’s not really new. Sparrow along with her friends make a good and reliable team, fighting the Deathless King and his minions. The action scenes are well done. Battling Sparrow and her group are some appropriately nasty creatures, some of whom are undead. I liked the flying rock beetles, which are ridden like horses. Generally though, the characters and the plot are pretty much what you’d expect in a Young Adult novel: there’s a lot of action, some soul-searching and a whiff of romance as you might expect, as well as a certain amount of youthful bravado which is often underlain by esteem issues. As a result, the main characters are clearly identifiable without the need for much detail.
In short, Fateless is one of those books where you get pretty much what you might expect. It is readable and it is entertaining, but to me the setting often felt familiar – for example, there’s a sea of sand! – and I found that even the plot twists were not too surprising. If you’re looking for an entertaining novel that focuses on characters battling against a seemingly invincible foe, then this might work for you. The characters may become favourites, and if so the reader will want the next book as soon as possible in order to (hopefully) bring the cliff-hanger ending of this book to a conclusion.
But for me, although it ticked what I thought a lot of things that will be popular, there’s not a lot here that feels new. I pretty much got what was going to happen plot-wise from the start. That is not as big an issue as it may seem – it might actually might mean that the book is liked by many readers for that reason, who just want to go along for the ride. The book is filled with energetic set pieces that are exciting, though I rarely felt that the main characters were truly in peril.
For me it was generally good, but although it was well written, well-paced and entertaining, there was little to separate it from the mass of similar type novels currently popular. In summary, I think that this is one of those novels where you get what you hoped for when you got it and will enjoy reading it, but it will remain pretty unmemorable afterwards.
Mark Yon
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