[Winners of the contest will be announced TOMORROW, Tuesday, August 26th.]

This was another book that, like last week’s Cobwebs, I got from the GIANT BOOK SALE. Ben picked it up originally, but recognizing in the title a reference to C. S. Forester’s Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (complete with improbable name), I was awfully interested in reading it as well. James M. Ward apparently has written a lot for the Forgotten Realms series, as well as a G. I. Joe book; this was his first standalone original fantasy novel in about twenty years. There is also a sequel, Dragonfrigate Wizard Halcyon Blithe, that was published in 2006.

In a world where a parallel to England is called Arcania and the enemy is the Maleen, Halcyon Blithe is a brand-new Academy graduate; he’s received the commission to be a Midshipwizard Fifth Class aboard the dragonship Sanguine. His entire family is in the navy, as well, and they’re all fantastically successful. He’s the seventh son of a seventh son and came into his magical powers very late, so he could possibly be very powerful; he doesn’t know yet. Anyway, of course he makes friends and enemies in the first fifty pages of the book, and these relationships will all come to play during his first battle.

Now, I’ve never read Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, a problem I will need to correct, but after I got about 30 pages into Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe, I decided it was either very amateurishly written, or perhaps a very clever parody of the aforementioned novel. However, I did go read Amazon’s excerpt of it, and the two books begin nothing alike and the language is not much alike; Forester is a master of tagging and if he has long convoluted sentences, they all resolve themselves quite nicely without being repetitive. I’ll give two short examples to illustrate my point (that the Forester is well-done and the Ward is not).

Here is Forester’s description of a seventeen-year-old Horatio Hornblower:

So he looked with attention at the approaching figure. It was that of a skinny young man only just leaving boyhood behind, something above middle height, with feet whose adolescence proportions to his size were accentuated by the thinness of his legs and his big half-boots. His gawkiness called attention to his hands and elbows. The newcomer was dressed in a badly fitting uniform which was soaked right through by the spray; a skinny neck stuck out of the high stock, and above the neck was a white bony face. A white face was a rarity on the deck of a ship of war whose crew soon tanned to a deep mahogany, but this face was not merely white; in the hollow cheeks there was a faint shade of green – clearly the newcomer had experienced seasickness in his passage out in the shore boat. Set in the white face were a pair of dark eyes which by contrast looked like holes cut in a sheet of paper; Masters noted with a slight stirring of interest that the eyes, despite the owner’s seasickness, were looking about keenly, taking in what were obviously new sights; there was a curiosity and interest there which could not be repressed and which continued to function notwithstanding either seasickness or shyness, and Mr. Masters surmised in his far-fetched fashion that this boy had a vein of caution or foresight in his temperament and was already studying his new surroundings with a view to being prepared for his next experiences. So might Daniel have looked about him at the lions when he first entered their den.

(Excerpt taken from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, published by Little Brown & Company, found at BarnesandNoble.com. (c) 1978 by Dorothy E. Forester.)

Here’s a section of description towards the end of Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe:

The sea dragon’s heart beat a little faster as the creature reacted to the battle-station drums. Normally the huge organ slowly pumped blood throughout the dragon’s body. Today the heard beat quite a bit faster as the dragon reacted to the drums. Halcyon had no doubt the creature could see the three ships in the distance and knew what was in store. The sea dragon had been in many battles in its nineteen years of service.

(Excerpt taken from Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe, published by Tor Books, typed out of my paper copy. (c) 2005 by James M. Ward.)

And while, yes, I did pick one of the worst paragraphs, I could almost pick any page in the book and find something that clumsy and repetitive. Again, Forester’s novel could actually BE that clumsy and repetitive, but somehow I doubt it.

The dialogue is also that bad. Here’s a particularly egregious example:

Ashamed, Hal quietly answered back, “It’s my demonic heritage and I’m not proud of it. Somewhere in our history, a Blithe mated with a demoness and the family’s curse of bad blood has continued for centires. I try to keep my anger in check. The glow doesn’t mean anything; it’s just something I have to live with.”

The next sentence starts with the three words, “It’s freaking amazing.” I somehow doubt that “freaking” was used as a slang term in fake-1800 England; it’s also the only place it appears in the entire book. While I know that’s exceedingly nit-picky, the constantly repetitive and banal dialogue — and the fact that the first 180 pages of the book was People Explaining Things — kept throwing me out of the story unnecessarily. I even put a sticky note on that page. There was also a lot of comma splices, but since those are much more common in writings from the 1800s, I will ignore those and pretend that they were done as a deliberate stylistic choice.

That having been said, I’m mostly mad because it was a decent story. The idea of Horatio Hornblower with magic is just too cool to resist. The magic system I liked — it was very Newtonian. Despite a couple of inconsistencies, generally for every magical action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. The dragonships sounded kind of gross and cruel to me, but they were at least fairly well thought out. Yes, Hal’s a little too perfect — there’s nothing he can’t do better, faster, first, or longer than everyone else, and the only mistakes he seems to make are being too good at things. That didn’t bother me nearly as much as the clumsy writing. I probably even would have put up with (as I mentioned) two-thirds of the book being exposition and Hal getting lectured (after all, what else did middies do?) if it flowed better.

I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this book, and I wanted to recommend it to fans of Horatio Hornblower as well as fans of Patrick O’Brien and Naomi Novik, but I just can’t. I’d say perhaps if one is excellent at ignoring language and looking for a fun, light read, one might try it, but I wish I hadn’t paid even the tiny amount of money that I paid for it. 2/5 stars.