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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elemental" data-source="post: 1880507" data-attributes="member: 7931">If you enjoyed it, that's great--I'm not trying to rain on the parade of anyone who got enjoyment out of the books. This isn't anything more than me explaining why I didn't like it. But to address these points:1: To say that it's a 'feminist' book and that's why it sits ill with people doesn't quite feel right with me. Having a powerful woman as the protagonist is great, but make any protagonist too powerful and righteous and they just become dull. I can honestly say that would have been no different had the heroine been male. And the feminist message seemed very crude compared to say, Hobb's Liveship Traders series--"I am a woman, I am oppressed, therefore nobody can criticise what I do.". And even that feels hollow because the heroine never directly experiences the harshness of the oppression she rails against, and doesn't seem to have much of an investment in helping other women out.2: I can buy that--but it seems rather implausible that nobody in a world where song is the prime source of magical power was ever able to train any better than her. If there's some quality of Earth people that make them naturals at it, then there's the question of why nobody's ever summoned Earth people before (it certainly didn't seem at all hard to do from the book).3: Yes, they do, but the defeats felt way, way too easy. In Lord of the Rings, the Nazgul are imposing because they have massive power, possibly more than even the greatest of the heroes. In the second Thomas Covenant series, the two heroes can squash most of the opposition they face easily, but the drama comes from the internal corruption that they face from using their powers and their own inner demons. There seemed to be no conflict (not combat), because nothing was anywhere near a serious threat to Anna, and that resulted in a lack of drama. Less seriously, there's no face to represent the forces she's fighting against, which leads to problems like the Generic Evil Kingdom of the first book staying generic, because we never have a villain who represents it's bad traits.Of course, I've only read the first one, and speed-read the second. If you think these problems are removed later on in the series, I'll get one of them from the library and give it another chance.</blockquote>

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