Book review: Catalyst by NS Toledano

If I told you that NS Toledano is the pseudonym of a secondary school student and that Catalyst is his self-published debut fantasy novella, you’d have every right to go into this review with some major doubts. Reading on will, I hope, dispel many of those doubts, because Catalyst shows both great potential and more than enough quality to make reading it a pleasure.

At the heart of the story is a pair of star-crossed lovers, Sinn Sebber and Ellene Ekkard, who meet as part of a merchant caravan heading from the south of an unnamed empire to its northern capital, Valla. Their destination, unbeknownst to Ellene, is the same, but where the young woman is nervous and excited to introduce her beloved to her father, a man she knows as a gentle, tree-nurturing widower, Sinn is motivated by a yearning for vengeance. Because before the lord Turenno Ekkard devoted himself to botany, he, too, committed unspeakable acts in the name of revenge.

The force of the two men’s inevitable impact, and with it the tension the reader feels in its approach, is multiplied by the fact that Sinn is a capacitor, capable of generating and absorbing energy so that jumping becomes flight and fatal falls become a cathartic pastime, and Turenno is a catalyst, able to magnify any energy with which he comes into contact. The outcome is explosive and harrowing.

Now, I can’t tell you that Catalyst is perfectly polished. But the flaws make the work more impressive if anything, because all they would take to fix is a good proof-reader and a few hours. That’s the best I’ve ever been able to say about any self-published book I’ve read, most of which have needed a violent editor or a dustbin.

What actually stands out as you read is the maturity of judgement that Toledano exhibits in the story’s construction. This is a very short book, but one that manages to craft characters that are resonant and a story that engages throughout. The judgement of pace, the spacing of chapters, the gaps that leave just enough unsaid to keep things moving but not so much as to distract the reader from the central thrust – these are things that lots of experienced writers get wrong. Toledano gets them right.

Ultimately, Catalyst is a story of love and grief in which the moments of tenderness are touching, and the moments of devastation devastating. Toledano’s world is sketched with a confidence that allows the reader to trust in its expansiveness despite the relatively small segment of it that we witness in Catalyst. It’s a world that this reader, at any rate, would be eager to revisit.

Learn more and purchase Catalyst by N S Toledano at https://nstoledawno.com/