Review: The Chosen of the Light Begins
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 01 21, 2014
Matt Campbell’s “Spirit Summoner (The Chosen of Light)”, is an excellent start to a wonderful fantasy epic.  The story moves fluidly from at once creating a world with a unique history and current characters that move through it.  I enjoyed reading it, and I was so glad this was only the first book in a series from the author.Campbell tells the fantastic story of Darr Reintol, a village boy and young summoner with hidden abilities and strength even he isn’t aware of.  Initially, he thinks of his abilities as an annoyance, hearing the spirits babble incoherently.  But when Darr meets up with the prophet Nadiq Waq, the world the village boy thought he knew is revealed as vastly different and very precarious.  He learns that he can enter a realm of spirits, and control elemental magic, the very magic that might be turning against the world as evil starts to weaken artifacts meant to maintain balance.Campbell does an excellent job developing the story and the main characters and the world in which they exist.  He spends just the right amount of time on world-building, without making it over-bearing or dumping information on the reader as some authors tend to.  There is a lot to follow, but Campbell weaves together the story with the background to reveal a living and breathing.In this first book “Spirit Summoner (The Chosen of Light)”, Campbell brings life to both the heroic and the mental struggle of Darr Reintol.  He creates a world and characters that are entertaining and believable, and manages this first stage of the epic fantasy with the adeptness of an expert.  The reader will get a real sense of a larger world existing beyond that of the story, one in which the fantastic can, and will, take place.