AMoRaR Book Review: Becoming a Druid

A Month of Rain and Reads Reviews3 months ago7 min readAdd comment

Welcome to A Month of Rain and Reads, a celebration of self-published and indie SFF throughout the entire month of November. To find out how you can take part and view the whole list of content, visit our introduction post.

This is a guest review for Becoming a Druid by Mike Mollman as written by Dave Dobson.

A Struggle for Survival
Grahme has wanted to be a druid for as long as he can remember. Talented but headstrong, he runs afoul of a despotic, Mind-controlling mage during his initiation quest. The price of failure is death. Intrigue and distrust has turned the druids against him. Haggard and hunted, he must make impossible sacrifices or lose everything.

I recently finished Mike Mollman’s first book in his Protectors of Pretanni series, Becoming a Druid, and I enjoyed my time with the book a great deal. This is the story of Grahme, a druid apprentice who has a tendency toward conflict and brashness, something that’s cost him his reputation and two previous mentors. As the book starts, he’s learning from probably the last druid left who will take him on as a student, the grizzled, mysterious Boswen. Boswen, one of the nine leaders of druidkind, is a jovial enigma, seldom saying what he means and often presenting riddles or manipulating his young charge with half-truths or misdirection.

Most of the story centers around Grahme’s quest to become a full druid, a rite of passage all must complete. There’s a lot of variation in these quests – sometimes, it’s just winning a contest of arms or accomplishing something minor assigned to you. In Grahme’s case, the quest is lacking significant, important details, but it throws him into a task he barely understands and puts him in direct conflict with a band led by a powerful mind-controlling wizard who’s taking over cities and towns in areas where the druids formerly held sway.

A quest is a classic frame for a story, and Mollman delivers on that trope in all the ways that make it great, with side characters both helpful and harmful, with battles, misadventures, triumphs, and despair. There are frequent times where Grahme isn’t at all in control of what’s going on and is instead buffeted along by enemies and friends, many of whom know more than he does. Also, the plot leans at times on some unlikely coincidences, but many great adventures do, and a few of them may not actually be all that coincidental, it turns out. At times that kind of plot construction, with main character as passenger rather than driver, can be frustrating in stories, but Mollman keeps the action going and keeps you engaged, not only by the story itself, which is good, but by the really interesting and politics and society he’s imagined for the druids in early Britain, complete with details on farming, trade, religion, dress, and military tactics. That, for me, was the big strength of the book – the richness of the world.

Grahme is a character that takes a little getting used to. He starts the book as kind of an ass, which was exacerbated for me by the book being in third-person present tense. That’s something that usually takes me a bit to get used to, and it did here, although it didn’t diminish my enjoyment at all. With Grahme, though, you start to worry that you’ll be spending almost 400 pages with someone unpleasant, but his adventures and encounters, including some deeply emotional ones, and his dogged dedication to his goal serve to soften his edges and endear him as the story developes. By the end he seems to have learned how to be a good guy, and what being a good guy can cost.

That’s the real growth story here. You might expect a book like this to be about him learning to use his growing magical powers. It turns out, Grahme has very strong powers from the get go, able to take many animal forms with little cost or effort, plus skill at controlling the weather, knowing all manner of druidic lore, and being highly proficient with healing magic. He’s a scrappy fighter, too, including in one long very tense sequence against an enemy militia near the climax of the book. The magic here is a little hazy in terms of rules and limits. There are a few hard limits that lead to cool plot points – you can’t do magic when in contact with metal, e.g. – and there’s mention of fatigue, but Grahme often just keeps going, even when everyone around him thinks he’s out of mana. Knowing better what limits there actually were (if there were) might have helped the magic seem a little less arbitrary. Also, if you can become almost any animal, big or small, at will, there’s very little you can’t do, so sometimes it seems like his problems have an obvious animal answer that he doesn’t pursue.

Those are nitpicks, though. The book has magic in it, but it’s not the point – it’s just the flavoring. The real treat here is the quest, the colorful side characters, and the culture and setting and history. Grahme’s quest has stakes and meaning, and you find yourself rooting for him, even as he sometimes makes terrible decisions that have real consequences. I really enjoyed getting to know the world, and I was really glad to have the chance to try one of Mike’s books. He does yeoman service to the indie book community with his Bald and Balding show and his big benevolent presence on social media and at conventions. I’ve gotten to know him through that part of his life, but now I know that he’s got the goods in his writing, too.

About the Guest Reviewer

A native of Ames, Iowa, Dave loves writing, reading, boardgames, computer games, improv comedy, pizza, barbarian movies, and the cheaper end of the Taco Bell menu. Also, his wife and kids.

Dave is the author of Snood, Snoodoku, Snood Towers, and other computer games. Dave first published Snood in 1996, and it became one of the most popular shareware games of the early Internet. He’s recently published some puzzle card games in the Doctor Esker’s Notebook series.

Dave taught geology, environmental studies, and computer programming at Guilford College for 24 years. He does improv comedy at the Idiot Box in Greensboro, North Carolina. He’s also played the world’s largest tuba in concert. Not that that is relevant, but it’s still kinda cool.

Dave’s book Kenai was the winner (out of 221 entries) of the 3rd Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (SPSFC) run by Hugh Howey, author of Wool and Silo.