Voima (1995)

Three younglings - Roric, Valmar, and Karin - find themselves embroiled in a conflict between groups of immortal entities vying for control over the realm. They leap to the world of immortals. Then back to the world of mortals. Then back to the world of immortals. Then back to the world of mortals. In between, two stupid kings have a dick measuring contest and a dragon appears for some reason. But mostly it's leaping back and forth between the two realms. And so Roric, Valmar, and Karin finds themselves leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that their next leap - will be the leap home... 

Wait a minute, I think I got a wire crossed in this intro...

Voima is certainly an interesting one. At the outset I was wondering if this could be an underrated, somewhat forgotten gem of 1990's fantasy, but by the halfway point I realized the book fell off a cliff somewhere along the way and never recovered. Towards the end I was flipping pages as fast as I could just to get it over and done with.

The "voima" the title of the novel alludes to is basically author C. Dale Brittain's version of the Force from the Star Wars universe. It's the magically delicious energy that controls the flow of everything and if you're strong in the ways of "voima" then you're probably a bad mamma-jamma. Got that? Cool. Next we have this group of immortals called the Wanderers who are kinda-sorta revered as gods but, as we come to find out, are mostly lame and aren't really the ruling deities the chumps of the mortal world seem to the think they are. We're supposed to care about the Wanderers being overthrown by another group of immortals for... reasons, I guess.

Then we have the main characters from the mortal realm, who, yes, are meant to be youngsters, but inherit all of the most insufferable traits of perpetually immature youths to the point of being unbearable, made worse by the fact that they're more or less the only characters to be truly featured for the first 200 pages or so. I found the forbidden romance between Roric and Karin in particular to be one of the more unsatisfying aspects of Voima. These two characters are so deeply "in love" they'll go into weepy hysterics at the thought of not being together instead of gritting their teeth and persevering like heroic characters are generally supposed to do. It got to a point where I was actively rooting for these two to suffer some horrific fate to deny them their happily-ever-after... sadly, this was not to be. The plot contrivances to keep these two characters together almost made me launch the book across the room at one point: the two dopey kings mentioned in the intro above travel hundreds of miles with their retinues in tow to capture Roric, only for the kid to simply wander off and escape from their watchful eye a few pages later to rejoin Karin, who had also managed a completely improbable escape from her own delicate situation.

And for a fantasy novel, Voima is extremely light on any kind of world-building or atmosphere. Supposedly great distances between kingdoms are traveled in the space of a page or paragraph, and towards the final stretch of the story the jumps between mortal and immortal realms became almost comical, nevermind the fact that these gates between worlds that have been hidden for eons are found almost immediately by a trio of irritating nosey kids who just fell off the back of the Mystery Machine. I will also point out the occasional appearances from fantasy creatures straight out of the D&D bestiary were random and without any real pay-off. All things an author probably shouldn't do when they're aiming for epic fantasy.

Rating:

The voima is weak in this one...