Representation: N/A
Trigger warnings: Imprisonment, near-death experience, fire, death of a person from a weapon shot, disappearance of a person
Score: Seven points out of ten.
This review can also be found on The StoryGraph.

I wanted to read this for a while and when I saw one of the two libraries I regularly go to have this I picked it up and read it. This was again, another piece of Australian literature like the last book I've read but this is different from that though it is, dare I say it, not that original since it reminded me of The Prison Healer by Lynette Noni. The novel starts with the backstory explaining superficially and vaguely I might add about how the world in this story came to be and then it cuts main character Elspeth Gordie or Elspeth for short who has powers that no one knows about yet. Elspeth soon finds herself in a prison called Obernewtyn, hence the title where she stays for most of the book and that part is where the novel slowed its pacing. At least I got to see what living in Obernewtyn was like but the vague worldbuilding dampened my enjoyment and I struggled to connect to any of the characters. There are six more books in the series but I'm not rushing to finish the series. ( )

My copy of Obernewtyn doesn't look like the cover image to the left, mine is of an older printing, but Random House released the first 3 out of print volumes to coincide with the release of books 4-6 back in December of 2008. I like the new covers--they definitely fit the story better.

This first book in the Obernewtyn Chronicles is the shortest--the other five are all above 350 pages with Books 5 and 6 being over 500 pages each--but packs a lot of punch. Unlike with Fall of a Kingdom or Elske, Obernewtyn loves action. How could it not with coups, seditioners, rebellions and teenagers all thrown into the mix? Its not quite a non-stop thrill ride, but it can sometimes feel like it is.

Elspeth grows greatly, she's forced to by the religious zealots of the Council who fear her (and those like her) power, but never the less she grows beyond what I would have expected of her at first. She's definitely a reluctant hero archetype at first; she wants normal, wants to blend in and never noticed so that she can get away. Unfortunately she's too powerful, too untrained and willful to truly be the type of person she needs to be to be considered 'normal'. She tries though. I could feel her struggle to just lay low and let it all pass.

The cast of characters she meets is rather large, but the numbers dwindle as the adventure progresses and plots are made. Some of truly annoying, others I love immensely. I don't want to say who's who, since some of it can be considered a spoiler. Take a guess and I might tell you the truth!

The magic of the world is pretty basic--nothing too hard to grasp or comprehend--the peoples however are diverse and confusing if you don't keep close attention. The book originated from Australia (by an Australian writer) two decades ago. For the first half or so slang terms or idioms not familiar to American make no appearance. Somewhere after the middle though, when Elspeth begins meeting more people like herself and traveling beyond the lands she knows (which aren't that many to begin with) there's a slight shift in the narrative voice. Told from the first person POV of Elspeth throughout, I didn't expect for her 'tone' to change. It did however just enough to make me scratch my head at times.

My only regret is that the book is too short. Even though a lot of my questions are answered in later volumes, I still would have liked immediate gratification. Que Serra!
( )

Fascinating. Goodreads says that I read this ten years ago, which I don't remember at all. I guess that says something about the impression it left on me. I hate reviewing old fantasy, because I feel guilty saying that this has been done one hundred times before and better, knowing that Obernewtyn may well have been one of the first instantiations.
Nonetheless, there is nothing original for the modern reader - society got too advanced, set off a nuclear weapon, destroyed society back to medieval times; some people were mutated and therefore have magic (every bone in my geneticist body is twitching to point out how very unrealistic this is in several ways, but I'll defer); one girl is The Special-ist and she Will Save the World with the help of her Magic Cat and the Ruggedly Handsome and Terse, but Ultimately Loving Love Interest. Along the way, we will be "surprised" to know that civilization was destroyed by itself and the nuclear war. Her friends, of course, involve the Boy Who is Super Magic to compensate for his Blindness and The Boy Who Mopes after his Dead Girlfriend, the Very Delicate sacrificial lamb. Sorry, if I want a post-apocalyptic fantasy world with strong, yet loving female characters and brusque but lovable male love interests, I'll go back to reading [a:Sharon Shinn|28544|Sharon Shinn|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1218995575p2/28544.jpg] ( )

Well this was an oddly compelling little read.

Despite the lack of character development, or world building, or explanations of mysterious capabilities that people had, I weirdly still enjoyed this. It is quite short so there was definitely room to flesh things out a bit more. And guess what! There are animals that the main character can talk to! Another animal book in my booktalk repertoire. ( )

This is a book that I was really looking forward to and it turned out to be a great disappointment. The premise has all the things I like-- a dystopian post-apocalyptic world where science and knowledge has crumbled and people struggle to cobble together an existence, humans discovering their newly-developing supernatural powers, conspiracies and the search for truth, even talking animals... I see so much potential in this series but I was really let down by the author's writing.

One of the cardinal rules of writing is tell, not show. Now, there are plenty of books I've read that break this rule quite a bit and I still enjoyed them but this particular book isn't one of them. Instead of giving us the actual scenes wherein important information is revealed or important conversations occur, we are simply told afterward that this or that happened or so-and-so had a talk and said these things. It meant that there was very little action in the book because we're just given a summary of what happened only after it occurred. This made for such an incredibly frustrating and boring read and I no longer feel interested in the series. ( )