Genre: Epic Fantasy
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
Get It On Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Google Play
About The Book
He can choose to forgive, but can he ever trust again?
Aderin is the prince of the merpeople, the pampered only son of his parents and a beacon of hope for all magical creatures of the sea. When a group of humans calling themselves the Brotherhood of Mages starts abducting magical creatures and enslaving them, Aderin tries to investigate. Almost captured by the group, Aderin is rescued by a human mage called Ellwood who seems as determined as Aderin to end the group. As he gets to know Ellwood better, Aderin finds himself falling for his rescuer.
Just as Aderin whispers his words of love, he is captured by Ellwood who enslaves him. Forced into a human form and suffering unimaginable agony, Aderin struggles to understand his newfound status and Ellwood’s goals. Even as other magical creatures are enslaved by Ellwood who uses their powers to defeat and destroy the mages of the Brotherhood, Aderin is unable to hate the man.
Memories of Forgotten Waves is a queer, dark fantasy, enemies to lovers romantic adventure. If you love stories with morally grey characters who are trying to do the right thing, queer normative societies, and magical creatures, with themes of love, forgiveness, trust, and redemption with a heavy dose of angst and magic, you will love this gritty tale.
Buy Niranjan’s Memories of Forgotten Waves for a memorable tale of magic, love, forgiveness, and redemption.
The Review
Niranjan has created a fictional narrative in which world-building is secondary to establishing the personalities of her various characters. It is a world in which there are humans with magic (mages), and also a variety of magical beings who are inherently magical, each in their own way.
Central to the story are Aderin, prince of the merpeople, and Ellwood, a human mage. Immediately we know there is some sort of emotional attachment between the two, but then the entire narrative is subsumed in a plot that Ellwood has constructed to trick magicals into willingly giving him control of their power—the reason for which is purposely left unclear at first.
Aside from his paramour Aderin, Ellwood lures four other magical beings—an elf, a sylph, a phoenix, and a blood-thirsty predator from a distant, isolated land, whose creature form is never named. He imprisons them all in his keep—a castle-like structure that is only described slightly. As terrible as his tricking the magicals into his trap is, it is clear that Ellwood has a plan that, as he sees it, is for the greater good of the world.
Ellwood has the ability to conjure portals, and his power is tremendous with his four prisoners’ magic at his beck and call. Basically, the characters in the book can go wherever they need to go with little effort—which certainly underscores the power of their magic, but also gives the story an odd, disconnected sense of geography. We do visit Aderin’s underwater kingdom, which has a little more physical reality for the reader than any other place in the book aside from Ellwood’s keep.
The plan that Ellwood triggers turns out to be just the first in a cascading suite of magical problems, each more dire than the last. Throughout it all, Ellwood struggles with an overwhelming sense of guilt and sadness at what his “greater good” idea has caused him to do. Despite Aderin’s forgiveness and love, Ellwood seems to be stuck in a cycle of self-loathing—which is, it turns out, the central theme of the narrative.
All in all, it’s a fascinating view of a magical world, with more than the usual issue of infighting amongst various sorts of magical beings than we find in other works in this genre. Most satisfying overall is the gradual change in the way Ellwood is perceived by the beings around him. Although it pretends to be about enormous issues of mortality and divinity, Niranjan’s epic tale of magical morality is really more about the nuances of good and evil and personal responsibility.
Four stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
The Paranormal Romance Guild was established in 2009 by 8 Indie Authors and one Reviewer to be a constant help for authors. You can be a free author member, submitting your work for review OR become a Premium Author Member for a small yearly fee and enjoy many extra services including Free Beta Reads, Author Giveaways and many others. Your reviews are posted on our 3 FB Sites, Amazon, Goodreads, Twitter and Instagram. WE REVIEW ALL GENRES LGBTQ+ welcome.
Check out our website: https://www.paranormalromanceguild.com/
FB: https://www.paranormalromanceguild.com/
