Draxinger (The Draxinger Series Book 1)
It’s not often one can describe a book about World War I as “fun,” but Draxinger—even though it contains some horrific episodes—is overall a fun book and an addictive read. The author’s background as “Narrative Director of Microsoft’s legendary video game series Age of Empires” undoubtedly provides the grist for this magic-infused tale.
Our hero, Otto Draxinger, is a 55-year-old, widowed Oxford professor who communes with a gargoyle, a teddy bear, a raven, dead colleagues, and other assorted figments of his prodigious imagination. He diagnoses himself as schizophrenic, and his madness blurs the lines between reality and fantasy. While the story is full of surprising twists and turns, the voice of the narrator is the driving force. From the opening paragraph, that voice grabs readers and takes them from the stuffy confines of Oxford on a fantastical journey to an old castle and then on a secret mission into the middle of the war, where Draxinger must confront his evil twin, the Pale Major, and his equally evil grandfather, who had attempted to kill him when he was a child. He is alternately helped and hindered by a woman, known simply as Siren, and an ensemble of other characters with names like Buppy and the Alchemist. The descriptions are delicious as in this early passage: “I entered the tower’s cramped 700-year-old spiral stairway, a tube of stone like a giant snail’s crypt.”
With its mythic qualities and mesmerizing voice, this novel will appeal to fans of Tolkien, Gaiman, and Rothfuss. But there is also a solid grounding in the realities of the Great War and the political situation leading up to it that should appeal to history buffs, too.
