A new-to-me series by The Prison Healer author Lynette Noni, so far the Medoran Chronicles are pretty bloody consuming. The Best Niece in Australia has told me at leas 753,802 times that I’ve already read Akarnae, which turns out to be a bald-faced lie… I would have remembered these.
They’re purely YA, so if you’re interested in something that straddles that line, look elsewhere. The leads are 15-16, and the setting is a school. So we are looking at that age where they are old enough to see that the world needs changing, and to take some responsibility for changing it, but at the same time young enough to be… reckless.
Alex’s parents are off to an archaeological dig in Siberia. If you just thought “ok, of course they are, let’s not look to hard at that,” well, welcome to the club. So far, so tropey, right? Attempting to finalise her enrolment at her new school, Alex falls through a door and into another world. Medora is just like Earth (or Freya, as they call her), but here a subset of the population is gifted. These gifted kids study at Akarnae, and the school just so happens to have been expecting Alex.
Like the Prison Healer before it, I really enjoyed these first two books in the series. The settings are intricately realised, the world building is impeccable. The narrative always hints at a broader scope, a larger world beyond the school, but the information is slowly revealed as Alex essentially levels up in her training and becomes more able to cope with more shocks. There’s a fine line in YA fiction between giving your characters freedom to learn, act and save the day, while not making the adult characters uniformly duplicitous or oblivious. There is a lot of collaboration here between our young heroes and the adults in their lives, which brings a balance and realism to the novels that I appreciate more as an adult than I would have as a young adult reading the series.
If I could build my dream house, it would have a physics-defyingly large and multi-storied library, so a special shout out to Lynette Noni here for The Library, which is amazing.
But what about the plot, you ask? Well, there is a bit going on. We have the school for the gifted, with its library. We have the rest of the world, ruled by a king and a queen. We have a long lost realm – Meya – ruled by beautiful fae-like (but not fae) people. Thousands of years ago, Meya disappeared from Medora – nobody knows where it went, or whether the Meyarans have died out, or remain, hidden. There was a whole “Mortals are useless and should all be killed” race component to the rebellion that’s pretty well executed – the protagonists are the right age for that sort of injustice to be absolutely intolerable, and the ugly attitude in the most beautiful people on the planet is its own commentary on inner worth (which is probably a bit of a deep dive on a kids book).
I’m just two books in, and neck deep in the third, so Alex has not saved the entire universe as yet, but she’s working on it. I’ll continue reading as long as there are books in the series – another win here for Lynette Noni, who has become a must read for the Best Niece in Australia, as well as for me.