| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
The first novel (Child of the Grove) falls into two main sections, and the first part is a fantasy/mythology story that forms the prelude to the rest of the book. It made me think of Tolkien's Silmarillion - although I found the Huff story more readable.
As the book progresses we start to get hints of Huff's usual style but the book is fairly standard fantasy fare, with a denouement that owes more to chance than to the actions of the characters.
The second novel (The Last Wizard) is altogether more well-formed and the characterisation is more central to the work. I didn't quite believe that anyone could be as easygoing as the two main male characters but it was a pleasant change to see men so kindly depicted in a work by a female author! And there are some interesting and unusual mythical characters introduced to add to the enjoyment.
In this second novel, you can see Huff developing her own style of wry quips between characters. And the finale is well-prepared for and ties up all the loose ends.
If you can bear to read the first novel for the sake of the second this is worth a look. And if you're a Tanya Huff fan you might be very intrigued to see how far she has come.
A lengthy prequel pits Rael, son of the hamadryad against the evil wizard, Kraydak. Rael survives to beget a line of kings who are part Elder Race. Eventually Crystal, the true heroine of this duology is born.
Kraydak, the wizard also survives. He has been waiting through many boring thousands of years for the birth of Crystal, the only human who might give him a magical run for his continuing existence. Meanwhile he amuses himself by building towers with human blood as mortar, torturing various walk-ons, etc.--even in this early novel, Tanya Huff writes zingy, attention-getting prose about evil--you gotta hate her bad guys, even though they're often her most interesting characters.
Presumably the good guys should be interesting, too. My only problem with Crystal is that she doesn't have room to grow. She starts out as a total knock-out with emerald eyes and silver hair, is born into the royal family, and is the world's most powerful wizard, except for Kraydak. The Centaurs educate Crystal offstage, which is too bad as this might have been the most appealing part of the book. As it is written, she enters the spotlight as a slightly sulky, sex-crazed teen-ager who happens to be a gorgeous princess-wizard.
In Book I, "Child of the Grove," Crystal battles Kraydak, the wizard who killed a god. Book II, "The Last Wizard" follows Crystal's adventures as she attempts to clean up a dead wizard's castle. Her quests are standard fantasy fare, but there's a strong cast of eccentric supporting characters, and even early Huff reads better than half the sword and sorcery stuff that's currently on the market
Most of the characters in this story are just plain boring and unfleshed out. The story basically reads like a rough plot that has just been expanded on a little. We don't know anything about her powers only that she can do nearly anything she wants, we don't know enough about the history of the world other than "wizards bad", and the oh so powerful elder races pop in say cryptic things and pop out.
The author also goes off in weird tangents involving minor characters from the beginning of the book then never resolves what happens with them. That is very annoying. If you aren't going to resolve it then don't bring it up I would rather not have a weird little tidbit about someone whose on scene a whole 5 pages then disappears to far off countries only to go back to her for a paragraph before never returning to her again. It breaks up the flow of the story. Honestly the first book of this omnibus is a rather sophomoric attempt. Huff can do amazing things when she writes but this one just doesn't cut it. It was not worth buying.
As for the second portion of this book, I am still unimpressed. While the characters are more believable this time through as well as more fleshed out the entire story plays out like some bizzare teenaged romance story. The brothers are childish and unimportant other than one of them has a romantic involvement with the lead. Death is whiney, though I must admit he is the most interesting character of the book. The story builds like some sort of dungeon crawl to the climax and that poofs out like some sort mystical author hand waving. In fact the ending is so vague the reader is left wondering what the heck happened. This is never truly resolved even in the epilogue. The entire tale plays out like a D&D game run by an inexperienced dungeon master. "Let's find treasure..........Lets go through this forest.....fight some baddies....Oh look a maze......We're in trouble now...... Oh yay the mystical whatzits has saved us." Honestly this is not what I expected when I got this book. An author such as this one should not have released such a poorly written manuscript. This whole omnibus was a complete dissapointment.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
