ISBN: 0765341417
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Avg Cusomer Rating: 5
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Summary: A Fun Read!!!
I first started this series in Hastings. I was leaning against the book shelf and REALLY wanted to finish it.(I was to cheap to buy it!I LOVE the library!) Anyways the book was great!
Kellen is an arch mages son and the city he lives in is very strict. There is magic but ONLY men are allowed to pratice magic. Kellen is known as the 'farmer boy" because he's slow in magic and bigger in stature then most of the boys. He gets found with forbidden books called "Wild Magic." The goverment tells people that the Wild Magic turns people evil.
Kellen end up getting kicked out of the city. Good you think. No that is bad because they send "The Hunt" after you.
"The Hunt" are stone dogs that are sent to destroy the people the kick out of the city.
So kellen has a problem there and how does he solve it? Well you gotta read the book! Take care and I hope this helped ya! See ya!
Summary: If the story arc moved any slower the Sognefjord would have won the imaginary race.
I know ahead of time that a negative review will usually attract negative votes, but this novel lumbers along soooooo slowly that you experience a kind of temporal vertigo, a daze not quite resembling sleep - which would be an improvement for at least the sake of restfulness, - as opposed to the emptiness of spurious detail slatherd over, under and all around the hapless reader-as-victim. Ever have that sinking feeling?
And those are the KIND words I have about this volume. And a large volume(of space)it is - all 727 pages of it. When a novel consumes that much area of pulp, you expect a proportionally dramatic and passionate narrative. Provided here is something far less, in fact negatively disproportionate, FRACTIONALLY dramatic with regard to its length and bulk.
I point out that I am a long time Mercedes Lackey fan, going all the way back to MAGIC'S PAWN. Which was the first volume in wonderfully realized series. So, I'm not merely a nay-sayer, an incurable unrepentant crank, nor an egotistical "edgy" a**hole.
So - the major sin committed is that of elevating a supporting element to that of central point of attention. Which is to say the setting. In the hands of a near-master (which Lackey IMAO in point of fact IS) - setting decorates, informs, - permeates the narrative without becoming a distraction. It must not do so by dint of copy space, nor through becoming more than it needs to be, - a major SUPPORTING element of the novel. Particularly, it must not overshadow the main characters, no matter the degree of the exotic or speculative that the genre demands.
Again proportionality intercedes. If your presentation of setting is particularly grand, your main characters must rise with or above that expression. None of these in the OUTSTRETCHED SHADOW does so. Again, quite the opposite. Kellen is for the better part of the book, an unfocused dimwit. Hamlet was unfocused, indecisive, - but his story was tragic because he was noble and "deep". This motive dynamic does not work with a weakish dimwit. Idalia is a more robust character, but she is forever being frustrated by the glaring mechanisms employed in this instance of the craft. One can almost see the pulleys and gears dragging a symbolic caricature of the story arc as personified by a morbidly obese Peter Pan, - being dragged across the stage because flight is rendered impossible by the clumsy mass of obvious and tediously placed plot devices.
I think what has happened here is that the core narrative began, continued to be, and ended up as mediocre; and with these characters IMAO, inevitably so. The authors either know it, suspected it, or buried it within their poesis. The crafted or subliminally realized effect is one of the setting-as-meatloaf filler. Again, far worse since it is the main course, and the only course, over and over. Meatloaf again?!!
And/or with two talented authors, sometimes never the twain shall meet, and instead all editing remains an imaginary sunset on the horizon, never to arrive.
Thus the eponymous 727 pages, big and rude as a jumbo jet, which when we finish our journey, we exit neither ecstatic, nor moved to our marrow, nor even simply sated; but rather weary, lagging and unfulfilled, and possessed of an itchy nagging that the time could some way have been otherwise spent, - well.
Regretfully,
- Larry Hiam
Summary: Poor Pastiche
While I grant there were no obvious flaws with her prose beyond its lack of originality, I can not express deeply enough my dissatisfaction with this book.
Allow me to state clearly that I am not a 'high-fantasy fan'. I'm a lover of all literature - spanning everything from Robert E. Howard's original pulp fantasy (that was eventually corrupted by
Tolkien lackeys like Lackey), to Kerouac, Maugham, Lovecraft, Kundera, et al. Therefore, while I have no particular hatred for the genre, if you are the sort that eagerly browses the fantasy shelves at your local bookstore and gladly buy up the various offerings by Lackey and her look-alikes, my opinions will be useless to you. You have, after all, found what you enjoy; I commend you.
If you are a generally avid reader that occasionally dips their toes into fantasy literature, or someone whose definitions of fantasy tend more towards the Gene Wolfe end of the pool, then you probably are seeking an opinion of the book that will guide you on whether or not to purchase it. As such, I will say that the positive reviews you find here are written by the former group of readers. (For Pete's sake, they describe cliches as the book's selling point!)
Let us forgive Lackey's lack of originality for a moment: understand that she is one of those authors that has never tried to escape that vile child of Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons that pervades much fantasy literature today. If you know that you do not like this, stop reading now, and move onto your next book. If you are luke-warm on that genre, let us move on from there.
Her main character is presented with all the depth of water pooling in a belly button. He is young, brattish, and sort-of seeks his father's affection (except he doesn't; it's rather passive aggressive). This is not poor dramatic fodder, save for how terribly it is executed. His youth and brattishness is never utilized in dramatic fashion as, for some reason, this young man knows better than every adult around him, including those on the ruling council. Let us be clear: it is not just that he *thinks* he knows better (that would be fine characterisation). He *does* know better, every time. A great deal of the book reads like the wish fullfilment of a teenage boy (is that the primary audience?).
Even her "magic system" falls peril to this: the father is obviously using the "boring", "formulaic" sort of magic. The son/main character, however, is so very special that he is chosen by a magic book to learn the "better" "wild" magic. Everyone is taught that this wild magic is evil and bad and destroys society; the main character thinks it's good. Therefore, everyone else is immediately and completely wrong; and also, part of an evil conspiracy. Everyone in the world who thinks this wild chaos/wild teenager stuff is "good" is a white-hat, objectively proven so by the author. Everyone who thinks ritual and order is good is a black-hat, proven so by the author. After this is established, it turns out that ritual magic even relies on harvesting the soul-stuff of the population. Because, if we weren't sure if we ought to side with the brat of a main character yet, his father / the ruling council / those boring old adults are sucking the souls of the city populace for their own welfare.
Sigh. In the hands of a good author, that might have been used as a social commentary, in the vein of the original myths of aristocracy-as-vampires coming from the general feeling that they "fed off" the peasants. In the hands of Lackey, however, it's merely there to bludgeon the audience into making sure they side with the White Hat instead of the Black Hat.
The boy's relationship with his father is worse. If the father oppressed the child for what he truly felt was his own good, we could see some dramatic tension in the boy's resultant emotional distance and magical/political opposition to the man. However, the father apparently hates him. He does not even hate the boy in three-dimensions: it is without any apparent remorse that he, according to legal dictates, sends out various forces to kill his son (his teenage rebellion was what earned the death sentence). And the boy, as I recall, is not even all that upset or surprised by his father's reaction. Any possible drama to be mined from that vein is never found. What more needs to be said? The protagonist is the ideal wish fullfilment avatar of a teenage boy.
The remainder of the characters are written in the same two dimensions, wearing their white hats and black hats in the face of the oncoming evil army (the evil army is obligatory in all Tolkien-clones, after all).
The plot is essentially linear and obvious. As to one of the previous reviewers that said the linear and foreseeable plot is a *good* thing in a writer... No, child, No. It is one thing if the writer is following epic archetypes and so, to some extent, we know the brushstrokes the story is following. Many great writers use particular well-known story elements; if one is writing an epic in the Greek heroic fashion, there should be a concern with glory over death, and a character's importance should be commensurate with his looks and physical ability. However, a good writer would or could turn any of these elements on their head, and whether they did or didn't, these are /elements/ - they're not the entire damned book, plot included! (Note: this book is not based on Greek epics, I was just using that as an example).
It's quite another issue to write *the exact same book* that's being published by *every* other bland, formulaic fantasy writer in the market, all of whose plots could be predicted before pen touched paper. When the book's plot can be predicted within the first chapter, that's not clever artifice on the part of the author. That's a hint you can use the book for propping up a shaking table.
Lackey's prose and characterisation is as uninspired as the fan-fiction role-players write on the back of their character sheets. If you do not already love this sort of pastiche, move on. Otherwise, read at your own peril.
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