A Fantasy Without Substance | In a Garden Burning Gold by Rory Power

Title: In a Garden Burning Gold
Series: Argyosi #1
Author: Rory Power
Published: April 5, 2022
Genre(s): Fantasy
Page Count: 432
Rating:

Summary from Goodreads:

Rhea and her twin brother, Lexos, have spent an eternity helping their father rule their small, unstable country, using their control over the seasons, tides, and stars to keep the people in line. For a hundred years, they've been each other's only ally, defending each other and their younger siblings against their father's increasingly unpredictable anger.

Now, with an independence movement gaining ground and their father's rule weakening, the twins must take matters into their own hands to keep their family—and their entire world—from crashing down around them. But other nations are jockeying for power, ready to cross and double cross, and if Rhea and Lexos aren't careful, they'll end up facing each other across the battlefield.

Rory Power’s adult debut is full of interesting ideas: a world with Greek and/or Byzantine flavoring; near-immortal twins who find themselves on opposite sides of a building war; exploration of the varying ways systemic abuse might shape an individual. Yet a successful novel requires more than just a good idea. To effectively convey good ideas to readers, an author must communicate their vision in a manner that achieves both clarity and emotionality. So many times while reading In a Garden Burning Gold, I caught glimpses of brilliance, but Power consistently struggles to fully delve into her characters and the deeper layers of meaning beneath mechanical plot movement. The end result is a fantasy novel that has more “coulda been great” vibes than any actually rewarding elements.

To be fair, In a Garden Burning Gold is both enjoyable and readable. This is not a horrible book. It’s a longish fantasy novel that doesn’t feel unnecessarily lengthy, partially because the text rapidly alternates between the twins as dual narrators. This creates a sensation of movement and urgency in the story, even when the plot itself often seems to have little momentum.

I understand that saying “this is not a horrible book, actually” is damning with faint praise. The book is readable, yes, absolutely, 100%. But the problem here is that Power has created a book that looks nice on the surface but which has no substance or humanity below the top layer. The narrative is not that deep—and it should have been. Without a strong, complex foundation, a story can only get so far. In a Garden Burning Gold is a lesson in “show, don’t tell” writ large. Don’t tell me that your protagonists are locked in a political battle of life and death. Show me.

For example, the specter hanging over Rhea and Lexos—the thing that supposedly dictates their every decision—is their father and the power he holds over them. Their baba is a supernaturally powerful near-immortal ruler who maintains control over his children through a combination of cruelty, neglect, manipulation, and infrequent positive reinforcement. The author repeatedly tells the audience that Rhea and Lexos are terrified of their father, and so they are pathologically motivated to please him and/or avoid his anger. But Power doesn’t show readers why this is so. What specific things has Baba done that his children are so frightened of him? How exactly did years of isolation and manipulation bring them to their current state? Primary caregiver abuse shapes a person’s worldview and their response to not just the abuser but to everyone. It is complex and all-consuming. Power doesn’t even begin to delve into her protagonists’ relationship with their father, much less paint the vivid image that was necessary to make this a successful, emotionally-dynamic story.

And honestly, without the full scope and impact of the twins’ trauma shown on the page, the entire book must necessarily fail. There is no nuanced understanding of who these character are, what their innermost desire are, their flaws and fears and failings. Because Rhea and Lexos are entirely lacking in depth, it is difficult to care either about what happens to them or what they decide to do about it.

One of the central plot points in this book is that Rhea falls in love, and this experience changes her perspective profoundly. In a few quick sentences, Power informs her readers that Rhea loves this person and therefore she has decided to plot her father’s downfall, but she doesn’t explore Rhea’s inner world and how/why this romantic attachment was so impactful. Similarly, after fighting for 300+ pages to preserve Baba’s legacy and win his father’s approval and love, Lexos ultimately decides to betray his parent in the final chapters. This could not have been an easy decision, yet the text does not show the process that lead Lexos to turn on his abuser, nor how that choice cost him (or didn’t).

The last few chapters of In a Garden Burning Gold are meant to be shocking and intense, with a couple of key plot twists. A person Rhea and Lexos both trusted is proven to be a villain. Simultaneously, it is revealed that Baba murdered the twins’ mother because she was an obstacle to his plan for World Domination. There is hardly any emotional fallout from either discovery—betrayal, devastation, and grief should be palpable on the page, but they arenot. Honestly, the scenes are so underwhelming that I can’t tell if Power meant for them to be poignant or not.

In addition the the above, this book is plagued with a similar lack of depth and complexity with respect to the cultural and political dynamics at play. This is ultimately a political fantasy, but cursory worldbuilding and generic backstabbing don’t make for gripping fiction.

Overall, I think that the issue with the book is that I liked what the author wanted to do with her premise more than I liked what she actually accomplished. In a Garden Burning Gold is a disappointingly flat story that does justice to none of Power’s core concepts. If you’re going to write a book (in any genre) about how victims of childhood neglect/abuse live and function as adults, you need a lot more insight than this. In a Garden Burning Gold is like a half-baked dessert that tastes just okay enough that you don’t send it back to the kitchen, but also just weird-bad enough that you think twice before coming back to the restaurant.