#170 Maiden of Pain by Kameron M Franklin (Priests 3)
Read 7/7/22 to 9/7/22
It's a very strange book, and the quality control seems to have dipped somewhat... and it all started so well (I'm kidding).
Sorry, this one gets a bit ranty.
Ythnel is a young priestess of Loviatar, on her first trip away from the temple, and it takes twenty to get to here, and while a little flavour is nice (and a bit of backstory) well... nothing else happens.
Ythnel becomes governess to a brat called Iuna, although we've nor met her yet- only Iuna's merchant father who has hired Ythnel. Then, the voyage to Luthcheq, and now we're fifty plus pages in, and we've met Iuna at last- and she's a brat.
If the author had skipped all of the above, or else cut it down to a sliver then... well, nothing much will have changed, point of fact there might have been a bit more room for something more interesting later on.
Then, it gets daft, the issue is our hero, the novice priestess- remember, gets herself in all manner of scrapes. A little while later she's scheduled to be burnt at the stake as a wizard. The Art is forbidden in Luthcheq, the crazed ruling family- the Karanoks say so.
Ythnel escapes, and then goes on a long and hazardous flight, followed by a swampy (Werecrocodiles versus Wererats) adventure, and... it's just silly. Ythnel can do anything, she is adept (and much much better) with a short blade, a spear, a dagger, a bow...
Ythnel and her wizard friends spend three days in a boat without food and water before she remembers that she can purify water.
This series is called the Priests?
Later Ythnel breaks back into the city of Luthcheq and hunts out the three hidden caches of 'witchwood' which somehow prevent the wizards from doing their stuff here.
Just to make clear, Ythnel breaks into the young Karanok Lord's tower (by becoming magically buxom), then straight after into the royal palace, followed by the temple (of Entropy). She does all manner of dextrous and sneaky things while wearing the armour she stole from a guard. The guard in question being pretty much the only guard she has to contend with during the entire venture (except for the end of level bad guys). The point is the threat is told to us- Ythnel tells us how much danger she's in and then... nothing, she gets in- beats up the Lord, sets the witchwood on fire, heads off to the palace- dresses as a guard, etc.
This wouldn't be so bad if... well, she used some sort of divine or priestly magic to do any of this but as it turns out she may only be a level 3 cleric (5, at most) but she's also a level 7 rogue, level 7 fighter and- for good measure, level 5 monk.
She is appallingly good at everything, while at the same time the adventure that she's on- the threat, exaggerated, minimal.
If this was a D&D module (and I get that it's not) then I would have stopped reading it, if I wasn't attempting to read all of these books... well, as previous.
To make it even clearer, the stuff at the start- surplus, the stuff when we are moving from secret cache to secret cache through trap-laden, guard-filled, high-tension... there's none of this. Ythnel mooches around and generally the third door she opens contains the hidden 'witchwood'. It's just daft- this should be a series of close calls and climaxes but instead it reads like a shopping list of events.
Next.
We're short of pages in the end, and I've read a few of these now so let me tell you that not getting to the 300 pages mark is almost unheard of, I'd go further- 98% of these books are 306+ pages long. This one ends, with a terrible whimper, after 292 pages. I swear to you the first fifty pages could have been as ably done in less than a dozen sides, it's just odd.
I have no idea how this one made it to the canon, save that there are maybe two semi-saucy passages, but not really, not sexy, more just a bit creepy, and I guess someone somewhere said we'll have a bit of that.
I've not looked the author up, but was he a young fellow when he wrote this? It's very unsophisticated. It's just a series of events, some poorly realised (in comparison to other authors here) from which our heroes eventually emerge, sometimes seemingly, without having had any/much part to play in the outcome.
Nobody in the book (hero-wise) seems to be particularly real, it's all formulaic, with extra bits of odd.
There was a bit of me that wanted to keep reading (but not a big bit) just to see how it will end, badly- there's a meeting in the tavern, everyone says bye, and Iuna has learned to say please and thank you. Just really odd, and bad.
Read!
Stay safe and well you lovely people.
Cheers goonalan
