The Black Prism (the Lightbringer #1) by Brent Weeks: Reviewed by Christopher Preiman

With Brent Weeks releasing the Burning White, the fifth and final book in his Lightbringer “trilogy” earlier this week, I wanted to take the time to go back and talk about how it all began With the Black Prism.

Gavin Guile is the prism, something of a cross between emperor and god’s voice on earth, In a world where some people can draft magical power from certain colors in the spectrum, prisms have the ability to draft magic from any color, but for reasons unknown they also die seven, fourteen, or twenty one years after becoming the prism and Gavin has already lasted sixteen years. When Gavin learns that he has a son he never knew about, fathered during the civil war that put him in power, he’ll be forced to protect his son from scheming nobles and politicians in his own government while protecting his people from revolutionary elements that wish to tear down everything he’s built. Gavin must do all this while keeping a secret, one he’s kept for sixteen years, one that if found out might turn his entire empire against him.

Kip is to all appearances a normal fifteen year old boy. Yeah, he doesn’t have a father, but after the war that is true of most people in his village, his mother is an abusive drug addict, but since she is rarely around, it could be worse. He’s a bit chubby, but he makes up for it by also being awkward and rarely thinking before he speaks. So all in all, a normal fifteen year old kid, with one exception.

Kip’s eyes are special, not to look at them but in how they look at the world. While working with the local Dyer, a red drafter who moved to his village after the war, Kip learns that he is a superchromat, a person who is capable of discerning even minor variances in color, a skill highly prized in drafters, and something that while fully half of all women can do, something that only very few men can. If things had continued on, Kip would have probably lived a relatively unremarkable life, but when scavenging for valuable items in the old battlefield outside his village, Kip comes across a dying soldier and learns that a force is moving against his village a force sent by their own king. Quickly fleeing back to his village to try and raise the alarm, Kip finds he is too late to do more than watch as everyone he knows is killed and Kip has to flee with nothing but the clothes on his back, a dagger in a rosewood box and a command from his dead mother to use it to kill her murderer. How he is going to do this Kip has no idea, and he is more than ready to just give up and let the soldiers catch and kill him too, when he is rescued by Gavin Guile, the Prism and as it turns out, his father.

Brent Weeks has created a world for the Black Prism and his Lightbringer series that is rich with detail, history and wonder, and he has populated it with a amazing cast of fleshed out and complex characters, ones you can find yourself loving and hating, sometimes at the same time. The story is centered around Gavin and Kip and to me this is the most remarkable part of the story. On paper, these two characters should be completely unlikable, Gavin is handsome, charming, privileged, arrogant and supremely disinterested in taking his duties all that seriously, and Kip is a winy, impulsive kid with self-esteem and self-control issues, so in short a fifteen year old boy. That Brent Weeks can take a story with these two as his POV characters and still make you like them and want to know what happens to them is nothing short of amazing. I will concede, had I read this book in my twenties, I might have felt differently about Kip. It is a funny thing but as I get older, I find myself more and more able to look at the bundle of hormones, anxiety and neuroses that is the teenager with more indulgence and less irritation. I think it’s because I am not so old that I can’t remember going through it, but I am old enough that I am not trying to break out of it and prove myself an adult. Either way, Kip and Gavin are delights to read, even if often frustrating ones and the story they are a part of is filled with political intrigue, action, and more than a few twists and turns.

One of the things that keeps sticking in my mind as I think about The Black Prism is the world Brent Weeks has created. Too often, we get fantasy world #11476 and while fantasy world #11476 can be a lot of fun, it is nice to break away from that mold from time to time, and that is absolutely what The Lightbringer has done, with a magic system based on using different colors of light to produce objects with different qualities depending on the light, Red giving you a explosive jell, and blue giving you a rigid but somewhat brittle metal, for example, a government and society that Borrows far more from middle eastern and Japanese models than it does from the more typical European ones, and a technology level more reminiscent of preindustrial than late medieval, with early firearms, and simple machines being relatively common place. All of this put together adds up to a unique world that is unlike anything else you have ever and probably will ever read.

I can recommend The Black prism to anyone who likes their fantasy with a healthy dose of intrigue and action, anyone who thinks the Three Musketeers would be better if D’artagnan could form armor for himself out of green light and launch himself across the battlefield,and anyone who likes trilogies in five volumes.

Four out of five stars.

If you want to get a copy of The Black Prism, you can get it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the audiobook from Audible,

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Thank you and happy reading.