Warning: spoilers ahead!
I have been a follower of KlairedeLys on various social media platforms (particularly YouTube) for a long time, and when she said she had written and published Outsider I was interested but didn't get a chance to read the book until recently, when my younger sister lent it to me.
I'm going to be completely honest and say I was extremely dubious about Outsider to begin with. I have read and listened to some really bad fantasy writing before, especially when it was the first fantasy writing someone had done, and worried that the fantasy elements would be handled badly, that Astrid would have 'special snowflake syndrome' and that the plot would be clunky and unmanageable. Fortunately I found none of these to be the case in any huge way and I enjoyed the novel.
Outsider is about Astrid, a half-elf, half-dwarf woman who ends up travelling with a group of dwarves to help them try and keep their people safe. It's a solid novel premise: the action never feels excessively stagnant because the characters are always on the move and the landscape changes are used to signal changes in their relationships and attitude towards one another. Journey narratives are fairly straightforward as there is a clear goal in sight for the characters and they always have something to do. I felt that the ending of the story was a little anti-climactic, but in the same sense that the ending of the "Fellowship of the Ring" film was anti-climactic, in that we will come back to it later and there is more to be done.
Along with the journey narrative, the novel is interspersed with flashbacks from Astrid's childhood, starting with seeing her parents murdered in front of her and going to live with the warlock Dag. While the 'seeing parents murdered before them' trope is a tired one, especially in fantasy, in Outsider it is somewhat less jarring - the scene serves a purpose other than "look how tragic this character's backstory is" with some later complications that make readers look at the scene differently and reconsider the events.
The thing I enjoyed most about Outsider was that the characters had a lot of heart to them: the dialogue was clear and the individual character voices were allowed to be heard. In particular I liked both Dag and Ragi and their interactions with each other and with Astrid (and I was pleased with the lampshading of not knowing who or what Dag really was as it had been a question on my mind). However, I would have liked more development for all the characters - even Astrid didn't seem completely real - and some better explanation for why they acted as they did throughout the novel. Halvard's actions during the journey seemed more petulant than stubborn as stated, and why was Knud, who has been raised in the excessively racist dwarf nation, so immediately accepting of Astrid?
The fantasy elements in the novel were an interesting mix of traditional fantasy tropes and original ideas. The Tolkeinesque 'stubborn dwarves', 'graceful elves' and 'bad guy goblins' were fairly strictly adhered to, but occasionally something else would be thrown into the mix. I found the Leshy and Astrid's Vârcolac skin especially interesting and wish there had been more about both in the book, as small details like this would really have set the book apart from other fantasy novels and helped bring the world to life more as sometimes I found it fell a little flat.
I also felt that there were some moments that could have been set up and foreshadowed better, particularly the scene with the tree outside Ragi's house that then falls a few pages later. It's mentioned at the time that it might fall on the house, and then it does. Astrid had been to Ragi's hut a few times by then and I felt that the moment would have had more resonance had it been set up much earlier in the novel, when the reader had all but forgotten about the tree and the danger it posed. As it was I felt no sense of immersion in the scene that followed.
Additionally, I wish that the map of Ammastein at the front of the book had been easier to read. It was too blurry to read the names of things properly and I know that with a journey narrative as in Outsider a lot of people like to be able to read the map and follow along with the journey, so it would have been good if it had been clearer.
However, while I have criticised some of Outsider, I also really enjoyed reading it and intend to read any sequels that are written in the future. I am intrigued by Dag's backstory, along with seeing more about the goblin culture that has been touched upon in Outsider.
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Have you read Outsider? Did you enjoy it?
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