A twin-sun world. A scorched, barren wasteland. Multiple odd aliens. No, this isn’t a description of Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine from Star Wars, but it is the setting for James Maxwell’s novel A Girl From Nowhere, the first entry in his planned Firewall Trilogy.
In the novel, we meet Taimin, a crippled boy trained by his warrior aunt, who sets off on a mission of vengeance once his aunt is murdered. However, he soon gains companions in the mystic Selena, and a grizzled old trader named Lars. Together, the three acquire a new goal: to seek out the legendary White City, the one place in the wasteland where humans live together in peace and safety.
Of course, their journey doesn’t end on the happy note they were hoping. While Taimin and Lars do find the city, Selena is captured by the Bax, one of the other sentient races on the planet. Then the two men discover that the White City isn’t the paradise they thought it was, and instead holds a dark secret.
Where the book really shines is in how it handles Selena’s magical gift, Taimin’s personal growth, and his arena fight scenes.
Selena is a mystic, which in the Firewall world, means one of a select few who are able to travel beyond their body to see farther, enter other people’s minds, and sometimes see visions. Mystics are both feared and coveted for their powers. When the story describes how Selena leaves her body to fly through the world, we get an easy to understand picture. When Selena is forced to enter someone else’s mind, we see both how it’s done, and also the toll that this invasion exacts on both parties.
Although Selena is the titular character of the story, the book really revolves around Taimin. We first meet him as a young boy, and it’s his story that we predominantly follow. We are with him as he grows and matures, putting aside vengeance, falling in love, and ultimately becoming a leader who commands respect both because of who he is and what he has done.
Finally, the fight scenes. If you aren’t picturing something like from one of the fight scenes in Gladiator during these sequences, then I don’t know what to tell you. James Maxwell can write an excellent fight scene.
I also won’t spoil the book’s final twist, but suffice it to say that it sets up a dramatically different scenario for the follow-on title, A World of Secrets. That the author does this without compromising the quality of the ending for A Girl From Nowhere is something that a lot of other authors could stand to learn from. A series is a great thing, and finishing one book in the series should definitely leave the reader wanting more, but not in the way that’s effectively “Get the rest of the story in Part II”.