Simon Fayter and the Doors of Bone

Simon Fayter and the Doors of Bone
by Austin J. Bailey
Recommended Ages: 12+

I recently fell prey to one of those ads for exciting new fantasy franchises that float up and down my Facebook feed, and ordered – not this book mind you – but what proved to be one of the most dreadfully written books I've ever laid eyes on. Eventually, perhaps, I'll review that book. I only mention it here so to give you an idea of how hesitant I was to risk falling into the same trap. But then I went and bought this book, lured in through a similar ad, and after reading it all in one sick afternoon on the couch, I'll grant that it was quite fun and now I'm interested in continuing with the quintet.

It's a frightfully original story idea. There's this little boy who's in danger from the day he's born. Luckily he has a couple of wizards watching over him, protecting him from the baddies who are out to get him. The big bad seems interested in what he's destined to do. As he reaches a certain age (13, actually), he starts to experience some weird stuff, and then he receives the news that he's a wizard just before he gets whisked off to a secret, magical school and becomes lifelong besties with the first two kids he meets. I know, it doesn't sound like anything you've ever read before, right?

Author Austin J. Bailey is self-aware enough that he actually makes references to J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter while teasing the fact that this variation on the Hogwarts trope veers quickly off the path. So, yes, a kid who's completely ignorant about the existence of magic, and its history and culture, lands like a fish out of water at a magical school so remote from everyday life that it might as well be on a different planet (in this case, it is), and after a Sorting Hat-type scene is revealed to be the Promised One, an instant celebrity, who is nevertheless instantly hated by one professor and who gets taken under the rather eccentric wing of another. And then, at midnight, he and his two besties go through a door they're not supposed to go (especially in the middle of the night) and stick their noses into matter they'd best have left alone. So far, so very Harry.

But if you don't cherry-pick the facts with which I filled that last paragraph, or phrase some of them differently, the impression that this is a straight-up Harry Potter knockoff recedes somewhat into the background. Simon, whose last name is actually Jacobson, goes to a school called Skelligard that takes young wizards from all sorts of planets. They arrive via (ahem) Portal Potty, then travel through another spacetime portal before arriving at – yes, a castle – and being weighed on an elaborate scale that is meant to tell them which branch of magic they belong to. There are supposed to be seven types, with names such as Clink, Bright, Strong, Seer, Muse and two more that have slipped my mind. But the scale calibrated to those types literally explodes after Simon steps on it, and the weighing can only continue when a very old, obsolete model is brought up from the (capital ess) Stores that includes an eighth branch of magic: Fayter. They stopped looking for Fayters ages ago. There has only ever been one, ever, and he was the great hero who founded the school a thousand years ago. And guess which branch the needle points to when Simon steps on the scale.

All this is very exciting for everybody. Already, before he can even pass his admission interview (which, strangely, happens after the weighing), Simon has an enemy on the faculty, and none of the profs wants to be his advisor, and the sheer weight of the stuff Simon doesn't know about the world he has gotten himself into starts to press down on him with crushing force. There are prophecies that another Fayter would arise, prophecies long since written off as demented ravings. Even so, Simon's inability to fulfill them, upon request, is counted against him – among other things too complicated to describe here. So, he does what any Harry Potter type would do: He sneaks out of his dorm in the middle of the night and takes matters into his own hands. With disastrous results.

Simon and his friends, Tessa and Drake, find themselves on an interplanetary adventure where his cockiness, rashness and towering ignorance get him, them, and an entire world into ridiculous levels of danger. But along the way, he starts learning how to use the magical cloak he inherited from the original Fayter, tries to use his alternating days of good and bad luck to better advantage, makes awesome discoveries and important allies, and begins a growing process that, if it continues for another four books or so, might tip the scales of destiny for the entire universe, somehow. Heck, I don't know. This is as far as I've read in the series so far. But thanks to some of Simon's goofy, autobiographical footnotes, that does seem to be the case.

As in the previous book I reviewed, I can't find any information on Fantastic Fiction about either this book or its author. I'm staggered at how many times FF has failed me lately. Also, I'm not happy with the way the author's website works, making it quite a chore to get the information I was after. But what I eventually gathered is that this is the first book of a five-book series, followed in order by (Simon Fayter and) the Tomb of Rone, the Titan's Groan, the Eyes of Stone and the King Alone. Other Bailey titles include the Magemother series (The Mage & the Machine, The Empty Throne, The Paradise Twin and The Bridge to Nowhere). As for "about the author," his website identifies Bailey as a Wyoming-based author who grew up in Utah and is married with four kids – which is a good deal more informative than the back-of-the-book blurb with its nonsense about living in Hawaii with 17 cats and an albino baboon, working as a reindeer impersonator and collecting tumbleweeds.