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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elemental" data-source="post: 1878576" data-attributes="member: 7931">L.E Modesitt Jr's Spellsong series. I read a good review of the first book, and make a point of trying some author I've never heard of every now and then, so I picked it up.It's the standard fantasy plot--an Earthwoman gets magically transported to fantasyland, and finds that a talent she has (singing) gives her magical power. That's not too bad, and the mechanics of how spellsongs work are moderately interesting.But after a couple of hundred mildly interesting pages, her powers become utterly, ludicruously insanely over-powerful. She can burn people up just by looking at them funny. She's levelling canyons and destroying enemy armies by the thousand. She's immolating enemies from hundreds of miles away. I skimmed over the second book to see if it got any better--it didn't, there's a scene where an enemy protects himself by hiding in an airtight chamber in a tower, so she just flattens the tower. Elsewhere, an assassin nearly gets her, so she immediately then makes herself completely immune to the tactic he used ever working on her again.This could have worked if she had an equaly powerful enemy or (in the vein of the Thomas Covenant series), the story had dwelt on the consequences and responsibilites inherant in such power. But neither is there, and the author keeps beating it into the heads of the readers that she is always good and right, bringing Earth values to a backward world, so there's no personal drama there. It reads like the author was so enamoured of having a 'strong woman' main character that he forgot to give her any other character facets.She spends the whole book crashing round like a bad Elminister lookalike, destroying stuff and having the least developed relationships with one of her henchmen ever. She figures out that the ruler of the land is plotting to kill her, so incinerates him. She civilises the fantasyland, then realises that there's a Generic Evil Kingdom (who never actually do anything worse than the heroine on screen, so we just have the word of the author for how bad they are) that hasn't been dealt with, so she destroys it. These incidents are described with only marginally more drama in the books.I think there's some sort of pseudo-feminist moral in there, as the protagonist keeps complaining about how men hate and fear her. Of course, this doesn't stop her from exacting sadistic punishments and mindjobs on other female characters who stand in her way. And despite being given eternal youth about halfway through the first book, she's incessantly fretting about her figure. I'd mention the other characters, only there are none.I've read books I didn't like, but those were the only ones where I want the time spent reading them back.</blockquote>

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