Alzrius
The EN World kitten
I distinctly recall wanting to like this one, but not being able to, something I chalk up to what I said before about Elaine Cunningham's writing style.
From what (admittedly little) I remember, the book simply felt disjointed in its presentation. Taken in isolation, the plot progression, action sequences, and characterizations were all quite good. What didn't work for me was that they never felt like they really came together; you could almost hear the gears shifting as sequences changed. Having the right ingredients is important, but so is being able to mix and bake them correctly.
Liriel's ruminating on Fyodor's (I think it was Fyodor's) parable about "old favors are soon forgotten" serves as an example of this; while I can guess was that scene was supposed to accomplish (i.e. showing both her intellectual aptitude as well as her budding curiosity about non-drow people in general and Fyodor in particular), it came across as navel-gazing, in which she over-analyzed a comparatively unimportant "gotcha" moment (something you think the drow would be big on) of Fyodor's escaping capture...made all the more pointless by how she didn't seem interested in critiquing the minutia of other such interactions (lampshaded by that being one of the first times she met someone who wasn't a drow, but that still feels more like an excuse than an explanation). This is much the same issue I had with Cunningham's other series set in and around Waterdeep.
Of course, as you noted the sequence with Baba Yaga's hut at the beginning is ultimately pointless, something that I found off-putting. It was too reminiscent of Ed Greenwood's style of writing, where narrative cohesion is damaged by how so many things "just happen" in ways that, while not unbelievable for a high fantasy world, don't serve the story as a whole. Similarly, mighty characters, rather than being power-players with extensive influence over what happened anywhere in their general region, tend to be important only as long as Liriel and co. were within arm's reach of them. Once they got out of their vicinity, their impact on things seemed to drop precipitously. That's a generalization, of course, but the feel of it seemed to permeate this book.
I think I started on the sequel, but if I did I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
From what (admittedly little) I remember, the book simply felt disjointed in its presentation. Taken in isolation, the plot progression, action sequences, and characterizations were all quite good. What didn't work for me was that they never felt like they really came together; you could almost hear the gears shifting as sequences changed. Having the right ingredients is important, but so is being able to mix and bake them correctly.
Liriel's ruminating on Fyodor's (I think it was Fyodor's) parable about "old favors are soon forgotten" serves as an example of this; while I can guess was that scene was supposed to accomplish (i.e. showing both her intellectual aptitude as well as her budding curiosity about non-drow people in general and Fyodor in particular), it came across as navel-gazing, in which she over-analyzed a comparatively unimportant "gotcha" moment (something you think the drow would be big on) of Fyodor's escaping capture...made all the more pointless by how she didn't seem interested in critiquing the minutia of other such interactions (lampshaded by that being one of the first times she met someone who wasn't a drow, but that still feels more like an excuse than an explanation). This is much the same issue I had with Cunningham's other series set in and around Waterdeep.
Of course, as you noted the sequence with Baba Yaga's hut at the beginning is ultimately pointless, something that I found off-putting. It was too reminiscent of Ed Greenwood's style of writing, where narrative cohesion is damaged by how so many things "just happen" in ways that, while not unbelievable for a high fantasy world, don't serve the story as a whole. Similarly, mighty characters, rather than being power-players with extensive influence over what happened anywhere in their general region, tend to be important only as long as Liriel and co. were within arm's reach of them. Once they got out of their vicinity, their impact on things seemed to drop precipitously. That's a generalization, of course, but the feel of it seemed to permeate this book.
I think I started on the sequel, but if I did I couldn't bring myself to finish it.
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