A Review of Seth Hammons’s Prelude to Discord [Book Three of The Keys]

(2012, ISBN 978-0-9859841-2-0)
In the past three years I have reviewed the first two books in this series—Unheard Of and The Silent Sound. With this third installment, Seth Hammons proves that he has not only created a richly detailed and intriguing world whose political and economic divisions and clashes speak to our own circumstances in many ways in 2015, but that this world he has created can sustain as a multi-book series for the long haul.
For those who have not read the first two books, I strongly recommend that you do so before continuing on with this review. All four books in the series are available on Amazon, in both paperback and Kindle editions. 
As with the last two books, the rebellion sparked between the working-class, pagan Brecks and the mighty, militaristic Iori Empire is the centerpiece of the story, as the main characters, Rachel and Chastin (a Juliet and Romeo-esque coupling whose families are on opposite sides of the war) discover ever-more secrets about the use of music in their world as they travel by sea with an interesting array of sailors, all with diverse backgrounds and something to accomplish or prove. Their relentless pursuit of their personal missions causes plenty of micro-level conflicts amidst the larger backdrop of war, and I found myself continually shifting allegiances depending on the reveals.
Complicating all of their efforts are a pair of telepathic, sarcastic drumsticks that hold the essence of a mysterious character named Maletalio, who holds several secrets of his own that are still not close to revealed by the end of the third book.
Uniting the two sides, at least temporarily, is the common enemy of the sea-bound race called the demar, who are bred beneath the sea to wage war on the Humans. They employ magic and a fierce warrior ethic to do so, as well as unleashing an array of other sea creatures to do their will.
They are to mermaids as Nosferatu is to vampires—the scary truth about what truly monsters are, instead of some Disney sanitization of the things that dwell beneath and in the shadows.
Always at work in these books are the kinds of “Us vs. Them” mentalities in the characters that hit closest to home in the current state of lines in the sand in our world. Rich and poor; land- and sea-dwelling; religious and spiritual. And, within all of these broad-stroke dichotomies are subsets such as those that use music for good, or evil, or not at all (music being the metaphorical driver for power and desire that serves as the foundation for the series).
As with the first two books, Prelude to Discord is well imagined, well paced, and full of twists, surprises, and compelling questions. Seth Hammons is a very talented author, plain and simple. I look forward to reading the fourth book in the series, In Harmony’s Way.


This series is highly recommended for readers in their early teens to adults. The beautifully rendered maps by Zeyan Zhang (who also did the cover, which features the demar) and a Glossary makes it easy to keep track of the detailed world Hammons presents, and offers opportunities for reading clubs to engage with the books and the timely, relevant social, economic, and politic questions they explore.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“A Firsthand Account of Secret Societies”: A Review of 334‰ Lies: The Revelation of H. M. v. Stuhl.

   Translated by Samuel Chong (English trans. June 2021; originally published in German in 2000). ISBN: 9798513274353 In an age of Conspiracy Theory Mania—a mix of those who revel in it and those who completely reject it—there are few subjects that are as thorny and contentious as the idea that there are secret lodges or societies that set the course of geopolitics from the shadows, engineering puppet governments, wars, and catastrophes to subjugate humanity and main ultimate control. From the innocuous fraternal organizations like the Freemasons, to political and economic organizations like the Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, and Club of Rome, the idea that a select few are making decisions for billions is one that is often met with anger and fierce recrimination. No matter the “evidence” put forth about odd places like Bohemian Grove and secret satchels with documents outlining the course of wars originating with the Bavarian Illuminati; no
Read more

“ETs Among Us”: A Review of Earth’s Galactic History: And Its Extraterrestrial Connection by Constance Victoria Briggs

   (Adventures Unlimited Press, 2024). ISBN: 978-1-948803-62-5 Over the past several years, through the publication and positive reviews of her Encyclopedia of Moon Mysteries and The Moon’s Galactic History , Constance Victoria Briggs has become a leading authority on the subject of visitations to Earth and the Moon by extraterrestrials. There are two reasons for her ascendancy into this well-deserved, hard-earned position. First, Briggs does exhaustive amounts of research, structuring her books like PhD dissertations (the structural design of MGH and EGH is similar). Second, she remains a hopeful but very staunch skeptic. She is primarily a reporter. She presents the facts and lets the reader do with them what they will, without gloss. In this way, she is like Dr. Michael Salla and Paul Blake Nelson. Although she traverses the same landscapes as the Ancient Alien crowd (one of whom, David Childress, is her publisher), Briggs is the Joe Friday of the bunch: “Just the facts.” In
Read more

“Jung in Larger Context”: A Review of Toni Wolff & C. G. Jung: A Collaboration, by Nan Savage Healy

 (Los Angeles: Tiberius Press, 2017). ISBN: 978-0-9981128-0-0 (paperback) In the interest of Disclosure, I served as the editor for this book. That said, and keeping in mind the relationship of editors like Maxwell Perkins with their writers (in his case, no less than Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and, somewhat synchronistically—to use Jung’s term—Thomas Wolfe), this should not preclude a fair review. Indeed, editors are reviewing books all the time. The difference is, they have the opportunity to provide different eyes to the author’s work before the fact, as opposed to reviewers, who do so after the fact (although I have done a number of pre-publication reviews that precipitated changes before publication). But enough of that. I agreed to the editing contract for the same reason that I am now reviewing Toni Wolff & C. G. Jung— Nan Savage Healy’s detailed and insightful exploration of Jung’s unsung and nearly obliterated collaborator shines a powerful light on Jung, whom I, like
Read more