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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bad. Very, very bad., 15 Mar 2005
This is the worst fantasy novel I have read for a very long time. Sean Russell seems to have found a list of all the things an author is not supposed to do, and put them all together in this book.I was not overly impressed with the earlier installments in this series, but the quality of a couple of scenes and set pieces (eg the masked ball at the end of book 1) kept me reading, and being a completist I had to read this to finish off the series. I shouldn't have bothered. Russell's characters are overwhelmingly one-dimensional, more so than I recall them being in the previous books. One never gets any sense of what is driving the characters -- almost all of the good guys seem to be doing what they're doing just because they're good guys. Noble perhaps, but boring. There are not even any differences of opinion on how to achieve things. Instead, the "company" is more or less treated as one big (and not terribly interesting) character. Russell's idea of edgy, ambiguous characters seems to be confined to those who have made mistakes in the past but have a heart of gold nonetheless, and who now, having seen the error of their ways, are in no danger of ever doing anything bad again. Yawn. The setting is also poorly-defined. After three books, I have no understanding of the culture or beliefs of this place. It seems to exist more or less in a vacuum. The two competing families (Renne and Wills) have little to distinguish them from each other, and there is little reason for the reader to care which side wins, or whether they'll just end up destroying each other. Similarly, one is given little or no sense of the geography of the place. As readers of the series will know, the central concept is a world where magical "shortcuts" exist between locations, and secret paths into hidden realms can be found by those who know where to look. It's a great idea, but Russell just can't pull it off. For a shortcut to have any meaning, the reader must understand the normal distances between places, and this is something that Russell utterly fails to convey. There is no map, presumably a deliberate choice that's intended to avoid confusion about how the magical river can lead to so many different places. Unfortunately, the reader is left with no understanding of the world beyond a kind of amorphous blob. Journeys take exactly as long as it is convenient for them to take. I found it extremely jarring when the main group of characters, after a long, drawn-out journey to a place seemingly at the edge of the known world, suddenly find themselves a chapter later to be only a day's journey away from a secondary group of characters, who had been going in a completely different direction. On top of all this, the writing is poor and often laughable. The primary rule for any writer of fiction is surely to show and not tell. Russell repeatedly tells without showing, making it almost impossible to care about his already shallow characters. The dialogue too is bad and occasionally atrocious -- there were stretches where I found myself stopping on every second page in disbelief to re-read some terribly forced and unnatural piece of dialogue. In short, this book is a useful case study for aspiring writers to see how not to write. For everyone else, my advice is simple: don't bother.
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by Sean Russell
by Sean Russell
by Maria V. Snyder
by Maria V. Snyder
by Robin Hobb
