The last time I was at Comic Con, I met a baby named Vanyel Ashkevron.The 2022 Kirkus Prize Winner for Nonfictionįragrance has long been used to mark who is civilized and who is barbaric, who is pure and who is polluted, who is free and who is damned–įocusing their gaze on our most primordial sense, writer and perfumer Tanaïs weaves a brilliant and expansive memoir, a reckoning that offers a critical, alternate history of South Asia from an American Bangladeshi Muslim femme perspective. To say that these books changed lives is an understatement, and that they still resonate with fans is evident by the way we yell happily at each other upon realizing that Valdemar was a shared experience. A strong and sensitive hero, Vanyel was the first LGBTQIA protagonist I ever read and he single-handedly taught me-and many of my friends-that love is love is love beyond borders and definitions. There are likely elements in Vanyel’s characterization as a gay man that would seem outdated today.īut Lackey published the first Vanyel book, Magic’s Pawn, thirty years ago in 1989, at the height of the AIDS crisis, and at the time he must have seemed like a revelation to fantasy readers. I wonder sometimes about representation in Lackey’s series The Last Herald-Mage, which follows a character named Vanyel Ashkevron centuries before Talia’s time.
I’m often hesitant to revisit the media that I adored when I was young, afraid that it won’t hold up under the scrutiny of my grown-up brain. I wrote stories set in Valdemar starring original characters of my creation, found fellow fans to talk to on the nascent Internet, and lent copies to everyone I liked in the hopes that they would join me in my obsession.
For a space of my early teenage years, I felt like I spent more time in Valdemar than I did in reality. I could probably write an essay about each and what they meant to me. Lackey has written dozens of books, many in Valdemar’s land of Velgarth, others set in different worlds and historical eras.
But reading it so young did, I think, give me a kind of empathy.
I would still hand this series to fantasy-inclined adolescent (or adult) readers that I met today, with the caveat that the last book, Arrow’s Fall, is quite violent and tragic. Talia was unique in being an Empath, a Gift the Heralds hadn’t trained in a long time, an ability that both aids and ails her. The Arrows books, under the series name The Heralds of Valdemar, handle Talia’s coming of age and coming into her own power.
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