The Warrior Heir (Chima, 2007) is the first in "The Heir Trilogy". To be honest, it caught my eye almost exclusively because its cover looked interesting in a cheesy-cool kind of way, but who hasn't done that with a book before? The Warrior Heir is written in - what's it called? - third-person omniscient, where the main character is "Jack" and not "I", yet you still know what he's thinking. It occasionally jumps around to other characters as the author sees fit, to give you a fuller story and to try to not confuse you, though, as you'll see, Chima doesn't entirely succeed.
The story primarily follows Jack, a teenager with a rather odd problem. He'd been told all his life that he was born with a heart defect and had to undergo special surgery, so he's always had to take some medicine prescribed to him by a doctor from London, Dr. Longbranch, but one day he forgets to take it, and suddenly he finds that it's as though a haze has been lifted from his body. His senses are sharper, and he's much stronger and faster. As it turns out, he's part of a line of Weir - a secret group containing Wizards (magic missile!), Enchanters (these aren't the droids you were looking for), Soothsayers (look into my crystal ball), Sorcerers (here, I made these special anti-poopstain underwear for you!), and Warriors (um, hyah?). From the title, I bet you can guess which one Jack is.
To put it bluntly, I didn't care for this book. To put it a bit more accurately, I didn't really care one way or the other about this book. I found out that it's Chima's first (I seem to be making it a habit of reading "first" books lately), and boy does it show. Not only is her plot weak, confusing, and meandering, but her editor should be shot. Typos abound, and there were two occasions in which the same thing was said twice - once by a character, once by the narrator. It was sloppy and embarrassing to read.
The characters are alright - Jack's your typical, bland hero who's as clueless as you are. His Aunt Linda's persuasive and highly dominant in all her scenes, and Jack's two best friends - Will and Fitch - show at least a little personality here and there. There's the neighbor with a secret (Snowbeard, as if you'd never guess from his name), and the mentor with a dark past. Not to mention all of your typical "schoolyard" stereotypes.
A good writer can have a clueless protagonist while still keeping the reader interested and aware of what's going on, but when the reader becomes even more confused than the hero, you know you've got a problem. The latter is how I felt with The Warrior Heir. All Weir are born with a stone inside them indicating what kind of Weir they are (wizard, warrior, etc.; you know, like Dungeons & Dragons classes), but Jack was born without one, even though he was technically a Weir. How someone can be Weir without the stone that makes them so, I don't know, and I don't recall Chima ever sufficiently explaining it, but that's what happens here. Even though he was meant to be a Wizard, the most powerful of the Weir, the doctor from London (a Wizard herself) decided to experiment on him by implanting a rare warrior stone while he was a baby. Wizards, you see, hold a tournament every so often to determine which house (Red Roses and White Roses - of the "War of the Roses" from your history book) will hold the most power until the next tournament. Each house brings a Warrior champion, and they fight to the death. Therefore, the Warrior Weirs have pretty much gone extinct, which is why Dr. Longbranch gives Jack medicine to subdue his powers: she doesn't want other Wizards learning of his existence until he's ready to receive training from her and her Rose house (whichever one it is; I don't remember or care).
Maybe it's just that my memory ain't what it once was, and that I'm in the process of reading something somewhat similar that blows this one out of the water, but this book was riddled with plot holes the size of Jasmine, my 18-pound cat who at this very moment is doing that weird kneading thing to the bit of blanket on my feet. Jack and his friends join his successful Aunt Linda in a hunt for a special sword, Eterne - excuse me, Shadowslayer - that helps draw out Jack's powers or something. It's so hard to say, because Jack shows abilities both of the Warrior and of the Wizard, but no one ever tells you which one is which, so when Jack starts shooting fire out of his sword, I actually thought that was him being a Wizard until another Warrior does the same thing later. Anyway, once the plotline with the sword comes to a close, you enter another one that I guess you could call the "training" montage, though during the entire sequence Jack is never given a reason for why he is being trained. He just is, and that should be enough. Turns out, of course, that he's being trained as a Warrior champion for an upcoming tournament, in which he will be pitted against another Warrior in a battle to the death.
It is this last bit that serves as Chima's big mystery for like the whole second half of the book: who is the Red Roses' champion? (now that I say that, I recall that Dr. Longbranch is with the White Roses. Now you can sleep tonight) The problem here is that I called it before it was EVER brought up to be a mystery. I won't ruin it for you, of course, but the twist was so obvious that it just made things boring, like "yes, yes, we KNOW who it is, please Chima, you're killing me, and I wish you'd do the same to your editor." Add in other ultra-typical elements, like the school bully who specifically has it in for Jack, the ex-girlfriend who tries to mess with Jack's emotions, and the "I'm getting so cool and important that I'm forgetting my friends" subplot, and you have one of the most standard - possibly sub-standard - young adult books I've ever read. Again, I can't strictly say that it was a bad book (save for atrocious editing), but it definitely wasn't good.
That being said, my wife read the next two in the series and could not put them down. She more or less felt the same as I did about The Warrior Heir, but from what she says, The Wizard Heir and The Dragon Heir are much, much better, which is good to hear. I like seeing writers improve, and Chima needed it. I'll let you know how the next ones are once I get around to them, but I expect it'll be a while.
But please, don't expect much from the ending. The climactic moment was so out of left field, so impossibly unpredictable, that it was nowhere near the "aha!" moment that I think Chima wanted it to be. I'm trying to think of a sufficiently similar example out there for you, but nothing's coming to mind. I guess... imagine the Helm's Deep sequence of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Remember how it ends? Now imagine that you had NEVER BEFORE been introduced to Gandalf or Eomer and had only vaguely heard mention of the Rohirrim prior to that moment. Would you be a little confused? Would you feel like it was a bit of a cop out on the writer's part? I don't know if I've ever been so disappointed with an action-adventure's finale before. Ugh.
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