This is Book 3 in my “Hilari Bell Is Not A Teeny-Bopper” Penance. Hilari Bell is still a librarian and certainly not a teenybopper. I’ve reviewed two of her books prior to this, The Goblin Wood and The Prophecy. Apparently in the near future, she’s writing sequels to The Goblin Wood, and she has also started a duet of books about a shapeshifter, in a near-future YA SF setting. I’m excited about both, although we won’t be seeing them for quite a while.

Dayven is a Guardian-in-training; he’s almost fourteen, and on one’s fourteenth birthday, in his world, one is given one’s destiny. Dayven has always known that he wanted to be a Guardian, but his supervisor suspects he has magical talent. He goes to the wizard school to be tested, and it turns out that yes, he does have the ability. Of course, this makes him incredibly angry. Wizards, as everyone knows, are treasonous, honorless jerks. Dayven’s grandmother was a wizard, and she betrayed her country! However, the lord (of whose Guardians he wanted to join) asks him to at least pretend to be a wizard apprentice to make sure the wizards are loyal. If he does this, and with honor, he will win his Guardianship. Can he?

As usual (at least of what I’ve read), Ms. Bell has managed to take what seems to be a stereotyped or less-than-novel setup and make it interesting and fresh. John Flanagan also did the get-your-job-at-a-certain-age deal; Will, in those books, also didn’t get his first choice of future. Wizards being less than honorable and courageous? Try Terry Pratchett’s Rincewind. War academies? Well, they’re all over the place, but try Sherwood Smith’s Inda books. Did, overall, this novel strike me as being derivative, or did it remind me strongly of any of the books and authors I mentioned? No, it really didn’t.

The strongest part of this novel was the moral dilemmas presented. There are layers upon layers of spying, friendship, learning, and adventure. Dayven is forced, repeatedly, to reevaluate his views on honor, destiny, and loyalty. Sometimes the ‘right’ thing to do isn’t always the ‘honorable’ thing to do, and it might even involve betraying one’s friends, one’s country, and one’s own code. How does one know when one’s country and one’s readers are in the right? It’s difficult, especially when one realizes that they may possibly NOT be. While the correct choice may seem obvious to the reader, Dayven’s journey from knowing what is correct to being able to see a fifth side of a four-sided object is interesting and can cause the reader to consider the situation in different ways.

That’s not to say the book is dry philosophy from beginning to end. Dayven’s wizard mentor, Reddick, is in jail for public drunkenness when we first meet him, and is a source of humor and wisdom. While spying in the enemy territory, Dayven makes a friend (whose name I can’t remember, unfortunately), and they play a prank on the cook that is hilarious, to a point of pain. Dayven’s cooking is apparently so poor that after one taste of it, Reddick took the cooking duties back for himself. Overall, it’s still a good story, and the characters are fairly interesting. I found that the way the book made me (and Dayven) think was more outstanding than the plot itself. 4/5 stars.