Review of One Bright Star to Guide Them by John C. Wright

One Bright Star to Guide Them is sort of a riff on the Chronicles of Narnia 30 years later with the children all grown up. Tommy is living a very boring, normal life, pending big promotion notwithstanding, when he’s visited by an old friend from the past. A black cat. Specifically the prince of cats (although in my experience all cats think they rank as at least a prince). A little waffling and Tommy is off on adventures again.

And things sort of go off the rails all over the place. Wright spends more time telling than showing, just sort of ejaculating proper names and events in rapid sequence without context. There is some of this in Pale Realms of Shade but not nearly as much. Huge swaths of the story take place off-screen and we have to suffer through the re-telling. Perhaps because Tommy jumps directly from paunchy, middle-aged sad-sack to tanned, hardened adventurer without showing us the six weeks of adventures that led from Point A to Point B. The prose is more even, but it never soars to the heights of Pale Realms of Shade.