Magic fights for survival in Zoe’s ‘Memory of Stone’

Title: Memory of Stone
Author: Chio Zoe
Publisher: Parresia Publishers Ltd
Pages: 372
Reviewer: Nathaniel Bivan

The cover of ‘Memory of Stone’ leaves room for imagination, but whatever you think, it’s still likely to be a surprise when one gets to the first page. When I did, I realised I was on to something promising.

You see, I have read ‘A Game of Thrones’ and loved it. Heck, I should be using the present tense. I love that book. So, here I was reading a book that reminded me of it by a Nigerian author I didn’t know until then. I felt I was reading classic fantasy. I’ll get to the point. Set in a fictitious city known as The Bottoms, eighteen-year-old Nyx lives the life of a mercenary under Mr Vinnie, a kind of local warlord or mafia boss, if you like.

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The story starts with Nyx sending a ‘message’ to Lord Declan in the form of a threat. She sneaks undetected into his house while he sleeps and, with a blade pressed against his throat, letting out a trickle of blood, she tells him Mr Vinnie is “very displeased with how you handled yourself after your situation at the gaming hall – and even more so at the gift you left him. He does not take kindly to finding his own people beaten up.”

This is an example of what Nyx does for Mr Vinnie and how valuable a tool she is for the businessman. But everything changes when her best friend, Felix, goes missing and she decides to do something unthinkable that will affect her relationship with her employer and put her in harm’s way. So, she travels to Geishem where she would later uncover a grand plot, one that puts her dear Felix and other gifted magicians in grave danger.

Then there’s Egan, the masked commander of the detachment under Lord Belarius, head of the king’s detachment of the islands. Known for his bravery, Egan elicits awe anywhere he goes, particularly because his stories have grown into legends and very few people have ever seen his face. He too is only eighteen.

Lovers of fantasy, science and speculative fiction are more likely to fall in love with ‘Memories of Stone’ from the very first page. Zoe’s ability to weave in action is commendable. Take this from page 28 for instance:

“She went across roofs and alleys, blending into the shadows as she neared the gates. She crouched down behind hedges, waiting for the guards to make their round again. Patient – she needed to be patient. This was a game she had played countless times before, where the loser was always the person who lost their patience first.”

One not-so-bright spot in this work, however, is the author’s inability to chuck off some needless words or adjectives. The paragraph above is a typical example where “she crouched down behind edges” could easily have been “she crouched behind hedges,” after all, crouch already implies going down. Aside oversights such as this, that could easily have been checked by a line editor, Zoe’s confidence as a writer is obvious and is most pronounced in her choice of genre and style.

There’s no attempt by Zoe to infuse anything African in this work, and so it’s likely to pass for a story set in an imagined ancient Europe. But whether this is a plus or not is entirely left for readers to decide, after all, her bio shows she’s not a writer who limited by her origin, but one who’s exploring a broad array of fantasy inspired by multiple cultures and folklore across the world, including African mythology.