The Gods of Amyrantha (The Tide Lords, Book 2) - Jennifer Fallon

Rating: 7.5/10

Blurb:

"Arkady is in exile in Ramahn, the repressive Torlenian capital, where she makes some unexpected friends and some powerful enemies, all of whom seem bent on using her to wreak vengeance on each other.

Back in Glaeba, the King’s Spymaster, Declan Hawkes, has recruited the canine Crasii, Warlock, to spy on the Tide Lords attempting to steal the Glaeban throne. Warlock, desperate to get back to his pregnant mate, is forced to witness an unthinkable crime.

But things are not going smoothly for Declan, either. The Empress of the Five Realms and her family have turned up in Caelum, and Jaxyn Aranville wants any opposition to his plans for the Glaeban throne out of the way. That includes fabricating charges against Arkady’s husband, Stellan Desean, the Duke of Lebec, which are likely to bring her down, too.

And in the stark deserts of Torlenia, Cayal meets up with the enigmatic Tide Lord, Lukys, who convinces him he’s found a way for the tormented immortal to die. All he has to do is convince some of the other Tide Lords to help him. But with eight thousand years behind him in which to make enemies, that’s not going to be easy…"



Thoughts:

Still following the same formula as the original book, Fallon expands the number of cast members who become prominent in the story. Warlock and Declan Hawkes' characters are explored further, new characters join the fray, and the plot surrounding the origins of the immortals thickens immensely. Fallon also injects some excellent political intrigue in this novel, which is something I usually dislike in sci-fi/fantasy novels because it tends to overly complicate a good narrative. Fallon uses it to great effect to keep the storyline churning along.

Whilst it wasn't as much of a page turner as the first book, the chapters are much shorter, perhaps because there are more story threads occurring simultaneously and the author needed to context switch more frequently to keep everything moving at the same pace. Fallon manages to weave the disparate threads together quite nicely, and the pace of the story never gets tedious. For these reasons I found the book very easy to read in between doing other things, because I could read one or two chapters in a short space of time. Whilst the book doesn't answer a whole heap of questions posed by itself and it's predecessor, it did make me want to find out more.

Once again I needed a thesaurus for some of the words in Fallon's arsenal, nevertheless, the story telling is accomplished and satisfying. The author made good use of diverging story threads to create dramatic irony for the reader (Cayal and Arkady's story lines looking like crossing but not, and Declan Hawkes' suddenly becoming a major character and complicating any such tryst). At the same time, however, there is some satisfying conflict resolution at times, just not enough to kill the story!

A good, solid read.

The Immortal Prince (The Tide Lords, Book 1) - Jennifer Fallon

Rating: 8/10

Blurb:

"When a routine hanging goes wrong and a murderer somehow survives the noose, the man announces he is an immortal. And not just any immortal, but Cayal, the Immortal Prince, hero of legend, thought to be only a fictional character, a figure out of the Tide Lord Tarot, the only record left on Amyrantha of the mythical beings whom the part-animal, part-human Crasii believe created their race.
Arkady Desean is an expert on the legends of the Crasii. At the request of her childhood friend, Declan Hawkes, the Kings Spymaster, she is sent interrogate this would be immortal, hoping to prove he is a spy, or at the very least, a madman.

Set the task of proving Cayal a liar, Arkady’s own web of lies, and that of her husband and the King’s Spymaster will start to unravel. Nothing is really as it seems around Cayal, the Immortal Prince — the lies seem plausible, his stories improbable and truth more than any of them bargained for."



My Thoughts:

I read this book in 2 and a half days, inbetween visiting wineries and going the beach whilst on holidays. It was a compelling read, and kept me up at night wanting to know what happened next. The characters had real depth, and the dialogue was intelligent and well composed. I actually needed a thesaurus for some of the more obscure words Fallon managed to slip in. That's probably just me not reading widely enough :)

The plot was intriguing enough even though the storyline was fairly straight forward (well, at least for Fallon). Cayal, the Immortal Prince, provides a suitably likable anti-hero. Fallon manages to evoke a fair amount of sympathy for an otherwise flawed and unlikeable main character. The character of Arkady Desean is equally as well constructed, although she is a fairly traditional (albeit strong willed) female protagonist.

The limited omniscient narrator switches between major and minor characters alike kept the story telling fresh and lively.

The Alchemist - Paul Coelho

Rating: 6/10

Read this one on a plane from Hobart to Canberra. It was simple and easy enough to get into, but it was basically one long sermon thinly disguised as an adventure undertaken by a young shepherd, Santiago, on a pilgrimage from Spain to Egypt to find his "Personal Legend" - the one thing each person wants to accomplish in life.



The prose itself is sparse, which meant it didn't get in the way of the central message of the book. By about halfway however, I was well sick of repetitive themes, and in particular the phrase Personal Legend. This may be an artifact of the translation process, as the book was originally written in Portuguese.

Character development wasn't a great part of the mechanics of this story either, and I did find the beginning and middle parts fairly hum ho. What saved this book from becoming a complete waste of time was the ending, specifically when Santiago speaks the Language of The World to the desert, the wind and the sun. This may have appealed to my fantasy-genre sensibilities but it did tie the allegory together quite nicely.

I'm still not entirely sure if I would give this book the thumbs up or down. I think it's major appeal so far has been its accessibility to people who don't normally read, as it's quite short and easy to read. I'll definitely be interested to watch the movie, with Lawrence Fishburne cast as the eponymous character. I wouldn't however, rave over this book like a lot of others have done.

The Lies of Locke Lamora - Scott Lynch

Rating: 8.5/10

This book was a good self contained novel. It follows the life of Locke Lamora; a leader of a small gang of thieves known as The Gentlemen Bastards, who steal from the searioulsy rich using confidence tricks. I agree with one critic's take on this book as a "swashbuckling yarn."



Set on a fictional, yet rather violent renaissance-like archipelago, Scott Lynch does a surprisingly good job of building a believable fantasy world. Locke is a legend amongst the upper class for his ability to dupe the most guarded citizens out of their money, earning him the title the Thorn of Camorr. In reality however, he is a flawed, and largely likable anti-hero.

The story itself is told as a flash between the present and the titular character's youth, where he is accepted to into his gang and is mentored in the art of thievery by their father-figure master, 'Chains'. The story telling is done via a limited omniscient narrator who focuses largely on Locke to keep the main story arc going, which makes for an easy read. There are enough detours into other minor characters' points of view however, to build dramatic tension right up toward the final chapters.

Essentially, Locke's gang get caught up in a secret war between the current leader of the Undergound, and a mysterious usurper known as the Grey King. Locke becomes caught between trying to appease both sides whilst at the same time attempting to protect his men. This eventually leads to some hasty alliances between Locke and the other side of the law, and culminates in an extremely satisfying revenge ending. (It was satisfying for me, anyway).

There is a fair amount of swearing, and a healthy smattering of violence, which isn't all gratuitous in that it helps establish some seriously evil antagonists. Overall it was a definite page turner. It is extremely well written, and although it is one of seven planned books, it is easily read in isolation, as the ending resolves the conflict nicely.

The Name of The Wind - Patrick Rothfuss

Rating: 10/10

Description: Wow. This book surprised the hell out of me the first time I read it, and was no less satisfying the second time. The first in a trilogy called the King-killer Chronicles, The Name Of the Wind is essentially a hero epic narrated mainly in the first person by the main character, Kvothe. If you were turned off by that last sentence, don't be...

Although now in hiding, Kvothe is persuaded to tell his story to Chronicler, who has sought him out to give an account of how he became known as the King killer ... starting from the beginning. Kvothe feels that to tell the entire story in the right context he must start from when he was a child, meaning that by the end of the book, the King whom Kvothe assassinated to earn his malefic title has not even factored into the story. Not that this leaves the reader with any sense of frustration. The story of Kvothe's childhood, from his initial prolific grasp of magic (referred to aptly as 'sympathy'), to the massacre of his family by the Chandrian (bad guys), to his orphanage and eventual acceptance to The University, was enough to rob me of sleep for the few days I took to read it. Like any truly 'great' book, I found myself not wanting to finish it because the experience would be over and I'd have to wait half a year for the second book. I have given a copy of the book to others to read, and more than one has made the same remark.

The real magic of this book however, is that it even appeals to non-fantasy readers. My grandmother is the first to admit that she does not enjoy traditional fantasy, but she absolutely loved this book. I can see how many fantasy novels can alienate readers, and I think that the mark of a really good fantasy novel is that it can paint a portrait of another world, but still keep the reader's focus on familiar things such as relationships, emotions and good old fashioned wanting to know what happens next. Patrick Rothfuss delivers all these things. Fantasy elements are used sparingly, and obscure terms such as sympathy and naming (forms of magic) are described intuitively, without that pretentious I've clearly used a fancy word here because I am creative and if you don't understand it well then you must be unimaginative style present in too many novels of the genre.

For me, the vivid character constructions and their believable interactions (the unrequited romance between Kvothe and Denna being the most prominent), as well as the role of Kvothe's music and the natural dramatic progression of the storyline made this novel seem less like a fantasy, and more like an extremely well written historic text - if there ever existed such a thing as magic, of course. If there did, it would be this book. Read it.