THE SPIRIT LENS by Carol Berg
ROC, 2010, 464 pages, 978-0-451-46311-1, Trade Paperback, $16.00

Genre: Fantasy

Since finishing The Spirit Lens well over a week ago, I’ve been surprised to see next to no reviews about it on the book blogs and forums that I typically frequent. So far I’ve only encountered one, and I admit to finding the lack of attention baffling. I’ve been anticipating The Spirit Lens since I first heard about it late last year, and it was the first thing I bought in January. I went to the bookstore the day it was released and snatched it from a stocking cart while no one was looking. Admittedly, I had trouble starting it after that, which I blame entirely on the fact that I was terribly sick for the first week that I had it. I muddled through the prelude with a cloudy head, and only after I was feeling better did I allow myself to move on to chapter one.

Truly, there are no words to describe how I really feel about this book. I suppose the closest I could come would be to recreate the near unintelligible e-mail that I wrote to my friend the very second that I stopped gaping and put the book down—but not only would that be uninformative for you, it would be highly embarrassing for me. All I can tell you is that Carol Berg has successfully upended my world yet again, and as soon as I stop pouting over the need to wait another year to see what happens next in her Collegia Magica trilogy, I’ll start looking for ways to build her a shrine in my computer room.

But, in all seriousness, and despite my rather copious praise-raining (after all, we wouldn’t want to build it up too much, would we?), The Spirit Lens is an incredibly enjoyable fantasy adventure for those who love unexpected heroes, web-worked plots, magic versus technology, and librarians with a skill for investigative spying.

In lieu of my own summary, this time, I offer the back-cover synopsis:

“For Portier de Savin-Duplais, failed student of magic, sorcery’s decline into ambiguity and cheap illusion is but a culmination of life’s bitter disappointments. Reduced to tending the library at Sabria’s last collegia magica, he fights off despair with scholarship. But when the king of Sabria charges him to investigate an attempted murder that has disturbing magical resonances, Portier believes his dreams of a greater destiny might at last be fulfilled.

As the king’s new agente confide, Portier—much to his dismay—is partnered with the popinjay Ilario de Sylvae, the laughingstock of Sabria’s court. Then the need to infiltrate a magical cabal leads Portier to Dante, a brooding, brilliant young sorcerer whose heretical ideas and penchant for violence threaten to expose the investigation before it’s begun. But in an ever-shifting landscape of murders, betrayals, old secrets, and unholy sorcery, the three agentes will be forced to test the boundaries of magic, nature, and the divine.”

I’ll say it again, as I’ve said it several times before and will likely keep saying it—Carol Berg’s characters make her stories real. Yes, there are many, many reasons to love her novels: the plots, the mysteries, the settings, and the beautiful language. However, it’s the characters who offer the personal connections to all of those things and, without them, it just wouldn’t be the same. Not even a little bit.

What I enjoy, in particular, is the type of character she often chooses to tell the story. Now, I’m not necessarily a proponent of the “everyman” school of thought—I really rather enjoy stories about people who aren’t just your average joe—but in a way, I feel like Berg’s characters are just that…except that they’re not, exactly.

Read on….