Tor, March 2010: ISBN: 978-0-7653-1727-8

Blake Charlton overcame severe dyslexia to graduate suma cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University. He’s in his third year of medical school at Stanford, and teaches creative writing to medical students. To top off these accomplishments, Charlton has written an impressive debut novel, Spellwright that’s sure to please fantasy fans. Charlton believes a writer should write what he knows, what he loves and what he fears. Thus was born Nicodemus Weal, the protagonist of Spellwright who also suffers from dyslexia. In Nicodemus’s case though, the results of his disability, called cacography, in the novel have potentially disastrous consequences.

The magic in Nicodemus’s world is based on written spells in different languages of varying degrees of complexity and other characteristics. The two languages of wizards are Magnus and Numinous and are silver and gold respectively. Apprentices like Nicodemus and wizards like his teacher, Agwu Shannon, create runes in the muscles of their arms and then throw or flick the spells from them. Nicodemus’s cacography causes spells he touches to misspell, so he must stick to the common languages and very simple spells to avoid repercussions.

This novel’s plot is very complex, but I’ll do my best to give enough information without spoilers to convince readers of its merit. Nicodemus is at Starhaven, one of his world’s wizard academies. Prophecies have declared that an all-powerful spellwriter, called the Halcyon, will save humanity from the demons; others believe that a Storm Petrel will create chaos around them, serving the demons. Some have thought Nicodemus to be the Halcyon because of a scar on his back, while others believe his cacography, which leads more to chaos than order, defines him as the Storm Petrel. Nicodemus himself seeks the truth, but can he find it before he’s condemned as the petrel and has all magic-writing abilities censored from him forever?

Charlton has not only written a unique story with terrific characters, but he has placed it in a well-built, believable world and woven in an intricate plot to boot. The story comes from multiple perspectives: Nicodemus, Shannon, Amadian, Deirdre (a Druid) – and a murderer. Charlton moves easily from viewpoint to viewpoint, maintaining tension and keeping the reader continually intrigued.

Charlton also writes in lyrical prose, especially beautiful in its descriptions of landscapes and the world around the characters. He manages to give readers enough history of the world’s beliefs and peoples, but he does it in small chunks, so it never slows down the flow of the story. Spellwright is the first in a trilogy, and Charlton leaves readers hanging from a cliff a bit while we wait for the next installment. All in all, Spellwright is one of the best debut novels I’ve read this year, and I highly recommend it to fantasy fans the world over.

Want to know more about blake Charlton? Go to http://www.blakecharlton.com.