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Let’s be clear here, and not bury the lede on this review: You have read Ryan Cahill’s Of Blood and Fire before. No, really, I promise you have. If you’ve read Lord of the Rings, or Dragonlance, or The Sword of Shannara, or the first book of The Wheel of Time, or John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen series, or especially if you’ve read– gag– Eragon, you’ve read Of Blood and Fire. The book’s biggest weakness is that in its nearly five hundred pages there is not a single original idea. It adheres to the dictates of classic fantasy with near-perfect fidelity, from the main characters hailing from a small town suddenly infringed upon by the evil of the outer world to suddenly dead parents to one of the three main characters being The Chosen One to parents and authority figures with a Secret Past to dragon riding to elves and dwarves and orcs, here called Uraks, to a distinct lack of female characters. Hell, all it needs is “A Noun” at the beginning of the title and even that feels ripped off.

There is a human king named Arthur and an elf named Ellisar, for God’s sake. I’m not going to bother to tell you what the book’s about. You already know. Again, you’ve read this book before.

And yet this is not going to be a negative review, because originality isn’t everything– hell, this book manages to rip off two or three books that were themselves massive ripoffs of earlier, better books– although I would neither blame you nor be particularly surprised if that first paragraph keeps you from picking it up. Somehow, despite being an utter pastiche of a ton of stuff that came before it, it’s a competent pastiche, and frankly it’s a pastiche of a genre of book that I have been a big fan of for my entire life. It’s a cheeseburger and fries. You know what a cheeseburger and fries is going to taste like before you pick it up, and you don’t necessarily need anyone trying to get super creative with a cheeseburger and fries, right? It can taste like three thousand other burgers so long as it does being a burger correctly, and, well, this does being a burger mostly pretty well.

(Why mostly? This is self-published, to boot, and there are signs of occasionally needing maybe one more editorial pass. The book begins with someone telling someone else they’re going to ask them Four Questions, and it’s said like that where you want to add capital letters, and then they ask them at least seven questions. Shit like that.)

I dunno. I four-starred this, and at least one of those stars was for the exceptional quality of the hardback– this book is an absolute pleasure to hold in the hand, with a pleasant heft and exceptionally smooth, creamy paper, and if you buy books for their qualities as physical objects you definitely want to own it– and I’m looking forward to reading the sequels, but it is absolutely McDonald’s fantasy fiction, to be even more specific with the “cheeseburger” metaphor. You’ve had this before, and sometimes you get a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese that was just made perfectly, but it’s still a DQP with for all that. That’s what this is. I’m in for more, but maybe you don’t like fast food, and that’s okay.

It has been, I think, sixteen or seventeen years since my last tattoo. I know my wife was with me; I’m less certain that we were actually married at the time. And while you very well might be looking at that and wondering what the hell I was thinking, I’ve been thinking about this exact design for my next tattoo (that’s my right wrist) for most of that time, and only just now decided to pull the trigger on it.

It is, oh, I dunno, sometime during the first Obama administration, and I am at a training with a bunch of other teachers from my school, none of whom are math teachers. We are presented with three pieces of construction paper, held together in the center by a brass paper fastener, in this shape: a large square, with a circle inscribed in the square, and a second square inscribed inside the circle.

“Figure out what the ratio of the inner square to the outer square is,” they tell us. “You can do whatever you like to come up with the answer.”

My entire group looks at me.

Sigh. Okay, fine, I’ll math this shit. To be entirely honest, I do not, at this time, remember exactly how I got the answer, but there was a lot of Pythagoras involved, and I think at least one place where I solved a set of equations with two variables. It took a few minutes. I’ve considered reconstructing the math, but I think the story is kind of better if I don’t. The ratio is 1:2. In other words, the outer square is twice the size of the inner square.

Anyway, they give us a few minutes, and then ask if anyone wants to share their answer. My group volunteers me to explain my answer, having heard my explanation and apparently accepting none of it. So I attempt to explain my logic to this group, again, none of whom are math people. It takes a few minutes and I may have killed at least one of them. The presenters, now with wide grins on their faces, because they are a step ahead of me and I have walked into their trap, ask if anyone else solved the problem in a different way. A large man on the other side of the room raises his hand. They call on him. He looks like a not-insignificant portion of the people who know him call him Coach, possibly including people he has never actually coached.

He asks if he can use their prop. They say yes, and their grins get larger.

He demonstrates a solution in about a second, by rotating the inner square exactly forty-five degrees to the left.

“S’ half,” he says, and sits the fuck back down.

I start swearing. There’s a moment of disbelief and then the whole room, including me, starts laughing.

Perhaps you have trouble picturing what he’s done. Let me draw this real quick:

I think it is probably immediately clear to everyone looking at this, with the inner square rotated, that the inner square is half of the outer square.

A few days later, I found a second construction-paper shape similar to this one in my classroom, also held together by a brass paper fastener. I kept it in my classroom for years. I don’t think I have it any longer, but I had it for a really long time, across multiple classrooms in multiple schools.

This tattoo is my permanent reminder that sometimes shit does not have to be complicated, which is something I have been fairly accused of in my life, more than once.