The Rithmatist Review

This week's novel is The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson.  I found this one recommended on a list of books about magic schools.

Joel is obsessed with Rithmatisits, people who can draw lines in chalk that have magical properties.  Although he goes to one of very few schools that teach Rithmatists, none of them will give him the time of day, and he's taken to sneaking into Professor Fitch, the only friendly Rithmatics professor's, lectures so he can learn.  When Fitch is challenged and loses a Rithmatic duel to an up and coming faculty member, he loses his teaching position and Joel loses his only way to study Rithmatics.  Except that now Fitch has the time to be assigned to investigate the disappearance of Rithmatics students and Joel is now allowed to be his research assistant.

The magic system is new and refreshing.  Rithmatists draw circles of warding, with bind points at select places where they can attach defensive or offensive chalk monsters or lines that block or more warding circles.  But the circle has to be drawn exactly right or it will be weak where the curvature is off.  The binding points have to be in exactly the right place or it will make a weak point.  And some of the positioning of the binding points require a fair bit of geometry involving the altitude of a triangle.  All this in itself wasn't new, but the fact that the functioning of the magic was explained was new.  This is done with illustrations at the beginning of each chapter that are pages from Joel's notes, so it made sense and the characters could talk about the pros and cons of each variation and about why some drawings went wrong.

Maybe this would be boring for people who don't breathe in math, but I loved it.  I wanted it to be even more complicated.  I doubt it could have been done without illustrations, which isn't something you see often.

There was also an emphasis on how little people actually understood Rithmatics.  This comes across in that Joel loves the math and the rote procedure and logic behind drawing, but he can't find this kind of quantitative analysis when dealing with chalklings, defensive of offensive monsters that the Rithmatist draws.  Joel makes friends with a Rithmatist student named Melody, who is terrible at drawing perfect circles and finding bind points, but draws amazingly detailed and well behaved chalklings, which Joel can't make sense of because it's not like "more detail=stronger" it's more like "more beautiful=stronger" and that's subjective and it drives him crazy.

It comes up again in that the kidnapper is using new Rithmatic lines that no one has seen before and no one knows what they do.  There are wild chalklings, with which the Rithmatists are constantly at war (they get shipped off to the front when they're done with high school), and no one knows where they come from or how they work.  It sets up a great dichotomy when the Rithmatists act like know-it-alls who are revered by normal people, and at the same time it's a science of which they understand very little.

Despite all this pervasive, nuanced magic system, there were aspects of the world building were just THERE.  I've discovered that I can usually suspend disbelief for one big thing (magic chalk drawings).  Then here there were related additions: North America was uninhabited when the Europeans arrived because the wild chalklings prevented anyone from settling or drove them out.  Europeans came to the New World to escape from the invading forces of Asia (what part of Asia?  Who knows).  For me, this is stretching it, but it turns out that the English King who came to America discovered Rithmatics there, so it's related to our main source of suspension of disbelief and there's also some neat world building where they have a much more British culture and are part of the Church of England (of which Rithmatics is a major part).  Also "Italian food" is eaten with chopsticks, and spaghetti is noodles with Chinese spices.

But then there's the fact that North America is an archipelago, with most islands more or less corresponding to states.  But why?  This relates to nothing and has little to no influence on the story or the characters.  It's just there.  And that's odd to me.

I've heard Brandon Sanderson talk about how there is no upper limit on cool things to add to a story, and if he has an idea, he'll throw it in.  But that turns into a problem when it doesn't affect anything.  The geography of North America is too big of a deal to have no bearing on the story.


***

Next week: The Reader, YA high seas, magical adventures by Traci Chee.