Not sure if anyone's interested, but, hey, I read it, I wanna dish about it.
So, in my quest to improve my knowledge of popular fantasy, I just finished "Wayfarer Redemption", the first Sara Douglass book. Australia's most popular fantasy writer, big world, big story, big series.
Hm.
I dunno. Maybe I'm gettin' snobbish, or maybe it's being a writer myself, so that I'm always looking for the strings. I sense that this is a book that I might have really enjoyed ten or fifteen years ago, and I still thought parts of it were wonderful, but... I'm not feeling compelled to read any further.
The Good:
- Nice descriptions. I could tell that Douglass had a world envisioned.
- Fast-moving story. None of this hundred pages of buildup garbage. We got rolling right into the big quests and action.
The Iffy:
- The poetry wasn't to my personal taste, although that's purely subjective. It felt a bit slipshod for something published in a major book -- but I'd imagine that there are lots of "it was from another language" defenses.
- The names of some of the races were too directly Greek for me. The winged race was the Icari, and the watchers of the dead were the Charonites. While I don't mind reading a fantasy novel where, in a fictional world, one guy calls another a sodomite (which should bug me, since the term comes from an actual existing city in the real world), having the Charon and Icarus names rubbed in my face just kinda grated. Again, that's something that might not bother others.
The Bad:
- Characters are fairly simplistic. The heroes are, by and large, utterly without modern-day flaws (that is, they have flaws like "was born out of wedlock" and "is a woman" and "is not of race xxxxx"). Our heroes are raised faithfully and fully in a religion that casts a specific race as demons, and yet, when they members of such a race, they act kindly and respectfully... because, y'know, racism is wrong. If there were some struggle, some real sense of the Huck-Finn-like conflict between what the characters have been raised to believe and what they see with their own eyes, that'd be one thing, but that's handwaved at best. Really, these are characters who have no flaws. On the other hand, most of our antagonists are pretty much evil and depraved and hot-tempered and, you know, have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's no wonder that all the common folk rally around the heroes. The wonder is that none of the cruel people in power got arsenic slipped into their soup before now.
- The Hand of Plot. If this were a roleplaying game I were playing in, I'd be accusing the GM of railroading me. There's a prophecy -- and this is hugely hypocritical of me, because all three of my most recent novels have had prophecies in them, but I try to aim for "prophecy that will be vague and open to interpretation, and will serve as a guide rather than an authorial 'here's what you have to do' list." Sara Douglass is firmly in the other camp. She has Sentinels, agents of the prophecy, show up and lead the protagonists around by the nose while constantly declaring their inability to act directly themselves. "Here, stand over here. Okay, now, draw your sword. Now hit that guy. Okay, and now you're going to have to do this." I'm sure that in some books, such an approach could have caused some good angst, with a hero fighting against the ties of prophecy, trying to fight his own battles or something. Here, the heroes just kind of blithely wander wherever the prophecy tells them to wander, and for no real reason other than that the prophecy is telling them to do so. It smacks of authorial laziness, and about the eighth time that the prophecy folks tell one of the heroes "And now, here's what you have to do, just trust us," you're going to get annoyed with it. Beyond being lazy, it saps the protagonists of any real power themselves. Sure, the author probably wants us to think that the prophecy was written because the heroes were so great that they would do all this stuff, but the way it comes out, the heroes could have been anybody propped up by the Sentinels and walked through the motions of prophecy fulfillment.
All in all, I'm not actually as negative about this book as it sounds. Some of the descriptions were lovely, and I got a good sense of worldbuilding and epic emotional struggles. There were some funny, cute moments, and a few descriptions of magic that raised goosebumps. If I do decide to read the later books, though, I'll be gritting my teeth against what Douglass did to her world with her prophecy-centric plotting.
So, in my quest to improve my knowledge of popular fantasy, I just finished "Wayfarer Redemption", the first Sara Douglass book. Australia's most popular fantasy writer, big world, big story, big series.
Hm.
I dunno. Maybe I'm gettin' snobbish, or maybe it's being a writer myself, so that I'm always looking for the strings. I sense that this is a book that I might have really enjoyed ten or fifteen years ago, and I still thought parts of it were wonderful, but... I'm not feeling compelled to read any further.
The Good:
- Nice descriptions. I could tell that Douglass had a world envisioned.
- Fast-moving story. None of this hundred pages of buildup garbage. We got rolling right into the big quests and action.
The Iffy:
- The poetry wasn't to my personal taste, although that's purely subjective. It felt a bit slipshod for something published in a major book -- but I'd imagine that there are lots of "it was from another language" defenses.
- The names of some of the races were too directly Greek for me. The winged race was the Icari, and the watchers of the dead were the Charonites. While I don't mind reading a fantasy novel where, in a fictional world, one guy calls another a sodomite (which should bug me, since the term comes from an actual existing city in the real world), having the Charon and Icarus names rubbed in my face just kinda grated. Again, that's something that might not bother others.
The Bad:
- Characters are fairly simplistic. The heroes are, by and large, utterly without modern-day flaws (that is, they have flaws like "was born out of wedlock" and "is a woman" and "is not of race xxxxx"). Our heroes are raised faithfully and fully in a religion that casts a specific race as demons, and yet, when they members of such a race, they act kindly and respectfully... because, y'know, racism is wrong. If there were some struggle, some real sense of the Huck-Finn-like conflict between what the characters have been raised to believe and what they see with their own eyes, that'd be one thing, but that's handwaved at best. Really, these are characters who have no flaws. On the other hand, most of our antagonists are pretty much evil and depraved and hot-tempered and, you know, have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's no wonder that all the common folk rally around the heroes. The wonder is that none of the cruel people in power got arsenic slipped into their soup before now.
- The Hand of Plot. If this were a roleplaying game I were playing in, I'd be accusing the GM of railroading me. There's a prophecy -- and this is hugely hypocritical of me, because all three of my most recent novels have had prophecies in them, but I try to aim for "prophecy that will be vague and open to interpretation, and will serve as a guide rather than an authorial 'here's what you have to do' list." Sara Douglass is firmly in the other camp. She has Sentinels, agents of the prophecy, show up and lead the protagonists around by the nose while constantly declaring their inability to act directly themselves. "Here, stand over here. Okay, now, draw your sword. Now hit that guy. Okay, and now you're going to have to do this." I'm sure that in some books, such an approach could have caused some good angst, with a hero fighting against the ties of prophecy, trying to fight his own battles or something. Here, the heroes just kind of blithely wander wherever the prophecy tells them to wander, and for no real reason other than that the prophecy is telling them to do so. It smacks of authorial laziness, and about the eighth time that the prophecy folks tell one of the heroes "And now, here's what you have to do, just trust us," you're going to get annoyed with it. Beyond being lazy, it saps the protagonists of any real power themselves. Sure, the author probably wants us to think that the prophecy was written because the heroes were so great that they would do all this stuff, but the way it comes out, the heroes could have been anybody propped up by the Sentinels and walked through the motions of prophecy fulfillment.
All in all, I'm not actually as negative about this book as it sounds. Some of the descriptions were lovely, and I got a good sense of worldbuilding and epic emotional struggles. There were some funny, cute moments, and a few descriptions of magic that raised goosebumps. If I do decide to read the later books, though, I'll be gritting my teeth against what Douglass did to her world with her prophecy-centric plotting.
Americans.!
