About ‘From Chaos Comes Order: Chaos (book 1)’ by Jimi Rodriguez::
Genre: Young Adult; Fantasy; Coming of Age
Surviving in a school of magic and murder is not easy!
Jacob Titus is a forgotten boy from Eslor Island. With an absent father and a mother who battles Alzheimer’s disease, Jacob has long learned to care for himself. When he is discovered by a magical talent hunter, Jacob makes the difficult choice to leave his home and enter the Valcrest School for the Promised. As his school years go by, Jacob has to spend as much time trying to stay alive as he does finding a cure for his mother.
As violence and blood lust at the school escalate, Jacob must learn to figure out who he can trust. All he wanted was to save his mother. Now he must save himself. For more information about Jimi Rodriguez and his series, From Chaos Comes Order, visit the website at jimirodriguez.weebly.com today! There you can sign up for a FREE copy of Jacob’s rules for manhood and life.
‘From Chaos Comes Order’ has enraptured me in a way I have not experienced since I first discovered the world of fantasy novels as a young teenager. I felt like it was written specifically for me, as it is an accumulation of all my favorite fantasy elements and themes. I quite literally could not put it down and spent six consecutive hours tearing through its pages. It is one of those novels like several I’ve reviewed before that just has so much going on that it’s difficult to decide which parts to mention.
From the get go, there is an emotional connection with the characters. They are all distinct and real, with their own troubles and agendas. This includes the main protagonist who is forced into gang life due to his mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s, then subsequently taken to a prominent school where he chooses to study not magic, but chemistry so he may cure her disorder. While that is endearing enough, what I really appreciated about him is that he is not your typical hero, especially for books of this genre.
He doesn’t immediately have an affinity for anything. Unlike his chosen set of friends who are all top notch magic students or royalty in their own right, JT is the secretly smart guy who doesn’t know magic, barely gets through his classes, doesn’t have ambition for anything other than healing his mom, and is overall the “keep your head down and they won’t bother you” underdog throughout the course of the book. The fact he only begins to broaden his horizons at the end of the book and how his friends are shown as clearly “more special” than him makes his role as protag fresh.
But he’s not the only well built character. As unique as all heroes, villains, side characters, and undefined persons, is the setting of the story itself. Arguably it is several worlds rolled into one small part of a planet, thanks to each area’s strict beliefs (or laws) against venturing out of their region. These beliefs largely stem from age-old religious teachings surrounding Father Chaos and Mother Order, the dual god/goddess figureheads. The realm of Father Chaos is filled with those who prize power, those of Mother Order’s domain who honor compassion, the barren land of Brubaja which homes the forsaken, and even the lands west which have similar boundary rules yet adhere to a divine pantheon. It is when a few citizens of the different realms dare to scheme leaving their land that the main conflict of the series is foreshadowed.
The overarching (and in some cases nuanced) themes of exploring the human condition make this story one that is larger than life. It tackles everything from gray morality to faith in the unseen to humans’ inherent need for structure even in anarchy, or their desire for freedom despite order. There is not a single boring moment in this book. If a rating higher than 5/5 existed, it would have it, no doubt.
The author can be found on:
Twitter @JimiARodriguez
Facebook
Amazon
Goodreads
Author Website
((Review submitted to Amazon and Goodreads))
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~Sahreth ‘Baphy’ Bowden
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