I feel a little awkward reviewing Titans of Chaos by John C. Wright. It's the third in a trilogy, and while I have read the other 2, it's been a couple of years. I ran across this one at a used bookstore not long ago, and decided to finish the story. But I'd like to make reviewing books I read a regular habit, so here goes.
The Chronicles of Chaos is the story of five children who grow up in a private boarding school in England. The main character is the ambitious explorer Amelia Windrose. Her friends are the stoic Victor Triumph, the melancholy Quentin Nemo, the rambunctious and hormonal Colin mac Firbolg, and the preening Vanity Fair. They soon discover that they are not ordinary teenagers, but have magical powers.
But their magical powers are not all the same. In fact, at least one of them scoffs at the very idea of magic, even though he can accomplish feats no human can do. They find that four of them have powers that can cooperate with two of the others and simply nullifies the last.
They eventually discover that they are not human at all, but children of the Titans held as hostage for the good behavior of their people. Their captors are the gods of Olympus, who created the world most of us know, which the Titans consider a foul prison.
This book tells about their flight from their captors and their fight to keep their freedom.
The characters
The characters feel real. They feel like real teenagers struggling to figure out their social standing and love lives. (Admittedly, they are also very intelligent and excellently educated teenagers.) They also feel like real gods manipulating vast powers who could wipe out an entire army of humans with little effort.
The Olympians they fight against also feel real people, power-hungry and engaged in very high-stakes political machinations. They, too, are trying to establish leadership after Zeus was assassinated, which kicked off the struggle which resulted in the main characters being taken as hostages. Some of them want to maintain the stand-off, and some want to initiate a theomachy which will likely result in the world we mortals experience being destroyed so they can remake it. Unfortunately for our main characters, killing them would be an expedient way to start that war.
The magic
The principles of the magic in this book are explained in broad outline. Exactly what is possible or not is not explained in detail, but the general nature of each character's powers and how they interact is given. To refer to other authors, it's not explained in the kind of detail of a Brandon Sanderson book, but in better detail than a Harry Potter book. Thus, the use of magic in this book generally feels satisfying, but you don't feel, in retrospect, that you should have predicted it, as you might in a Sanderson book.
The story
As is often the case with John C. Wright books, the story alternates between cataclysmic action scenes with potentially Earth-shattering (not an exaggeration) consequences and extended philosophical and moral discussions.
