“Iman’s Isle” trades the physical journey of its heroes for a more metaphoric journey of an entire island. Writer S.A. Davis creates his world on a fictional island in the year 303, and does a good job of making this world feel much like our own. Many of the tales carry a hint of allegory that Christian readers will recognize, but not enough to make “Iman’s Isle” religious in nature. It’s more along the lines of C.S. Lewis’s children’s books. The magic is as wondrous to the island natives as it would be to us, and as the novel progresses and relationships are fleshed out the book becomes increasingly enjoyable. Davis builds the world of King Iman, his people, and the power-hungry Kavan, from the ground up. He invents its history, legends, religion, traditions, and geography, incorporating them into multiple storylines that follow a set of characters.

The downside to sidestepping the typical fantasy journey is that it takes a lot of work to get the ball rolling. In keeping with much of its biblical parallels, there are tons of characters that need fleshing out from the very beginning (I counted over ten in the first few chapters alone), and sometimes the novel can feel more like an imaginary history lesson rather than entertainment. But all of this makes it just that much more exciting later in the novel, once the cast has boiled down to a few primary protagonists whose mission becomes clear. The second half of “Iman’s Isle” is well worth the first half of it, and the difference between Davis’s work and other fantasy novels refreshes the genre.