It’s generally considered bad form to write a review of a book you haven’t finished. It’s even worse form to review a book you’ve only just started. So I’m not going to call this a review. It’s more of a first look.

Nicholas Kotar’s Raven Son is an epic fantasy series rooted deeply in the soil of Russian folklore. I was familiar with Kotar from In a Certain Kingdom, a collection of Russian fairy tales. I used to be on his mailing list, but somehow dropped off it. When I found out he was a speaker at The Symbolic World Summit, I decided to take another look at him. I’m very glad I did.

I think what sets Kotar’s work apart is that, like Lewis and Tolkien, he is steeped in a rich tradition of folklore that gives his fantasy a degree of depth that most fantasy writers lack. When I first read The Lord of the Rings, one of the things that grabbed me is how fully realized the world is. Kotar’s world does not seem at this point to have the range of Tolkien’s, but because of its grounding in Russian fairy tales, it has a similar sense of cultural rootedness.

To get that, you can’t just read Tolkien and Lewis plus more recent fantasy authors and try to imitate them. You need to grow up with mythological or folk traditions and fairy tales and to absorb them to such an extent that your thinking and imagination is thoroughly shaped by them. Kotar exhibits that kind of formation in spades.

Russian folk tales are not very well known and include a lot of things that are frankly rather bizarre, and Kotar makes good use of them. But this isn’t what makes his work truly original. C.S. Lewis said about originality, “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” My reaction to the book before I was 50 pages into it is that Kotar is telling us the truth.

As a result, some plot elements connect to modern issues and concerns, but they aren’t forced. Unlike some stories I’ve read, Kotar doesn’t seem to be writing about current events and disguising it with window dressing out of a Russian fairy tale. The contemporary resonances arise naturally and necessarily out of the plot and are a consequence of Kotar’s truth telling.

All in all, I am very impressed with the book so far. You may see further updates as I make my way through the series.