Ender’s Game was the first book I read by Orson Scott Card http://www.hatrack.com. I read it when it first came out and was hooked by Card’s writing. It may be one in my top 10 of all time. Janne from SPARK was named after the AI in Ender’s Game.

A couple of weeks ago, I wandered into a Half Price Books and found a copy of The Lost Gate. It’s the first book in his Mithermage series and was published in 2010. It’s a great read.

As always, the children that Card writes are both more than normal and somehow still prone to the foibles of their age.

We meet Danny North when he’s 11-12. He’s the sole child of the two greatest living members of the North clan. It’s just that “greatest,” while very impressive, is nothing compared to how strong its members were 13 centuries ago when the Evil One closed all of the gates, including the Great Gates that connected Westil, where the story mostly takes place, to Mittlegard.

Those who were stranded on Westil were once were once so powerful that they were worshiped as gods by the locals. Time has eroded their power. To regain it, they must travel to Mittlegard through a gate. A gate is a magic teleportation device with the ability to instantly connect two locations and to heal any who pass through.

All the clans on Westil want a gatemage born into their clan, but not any other clan. Wars are fought between clans over the years and a part of the peace accord is that any gatemage who is born must be killed as soon as his/her power manifests itself.

At 13 Danny discovers that he’s a gatemage. Now he’s being hunted by his own clan.

The Feral-o-meter came in at a solid 8 for the story. I love the characters, just perhaps not as much as I loved Ender. I’ll definitely read the next book – The Gate Thief, but have a few others in the stack to plow through first.

This is a book about magic. It’s not Science Fiction, and that’s fine, it just means I can’t honestly evaluate that aspect, so it’s a Not Applicable on the science scale.