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kedawen's review against another edition
3.0
I got bogged down in the middle, where things dragged a bit. But it was good to see the development and growth of both the city and the characters.
xeni's review against another edition
5.0
The creepiest part of this book often finds it's way into my mind again: the odd man who bound his captives with such strong psychological bounds, that the small bits of string that he wound across their limbs held them in place more securely than any chains would have.
The rest of the book was good too! Just that scene has really stayed with me. (I like how he was taken down at the end too, though!)
I love the Haighlei, as odd as they are. Their culture is so different from the rest of the people (not yet Hawkbrothers) as are their cities.
I liked reading about White Gryphon as well. Also, Skan has certainly grown up a bit from the first book :p
The rest of the book was good too! Just that scene has really stayed with me. (I like how he was taken down at the end too, though!)
I love the Haighlei, as odd as they are. Their culture is so different from the rest of the people (not yet Hawkbrothers) as are their cities.
I liked reading about White Gryphon as well. Also, Skan has certainly grown up a bit from the first book :p
inferiorwit's review against another edition
dark
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Blood, Death, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Gore, Violence, Toxic relationship, Misogyny, Murder, Physical abuse, Xenophobia, and Confinement
Moderate: Infidelity, Stalking, Slavery, Sexual violence, and Kidnapping
Minor: Ableism and Racism
eol's review against another edition
adventurous
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
bodagirl's review against another edition
3.0
PopSugar Reading Challenge 2017 | Task 17: Book involving a mythical creature
melanie_page's review against another edition
2.0
Beware, there are spoilers for The Black Gryphon in this review.
The war with the evil mage Ma’ar is over and Urtho is dead, but his people have survived. Spread as far across the world as they can, the Shin’a’in tribes must build new homes after theirs was destroyed in a huge magic explosion. We catch up with the gryphon Skandranon, whose feathers are now white after being bleached by the magic gate he crossed to escape the cataclysm in The Black Gryphon.
In The White Gryphon, we begin ten years after the cataclysm. Dubbed king of their new city, the white gryphon sets aside battle and glory for resolving minor conflicts and meetings. He’s not pleased. Skandranon and his human friend Amberdrake both have children now. They’re out of shape. They are bureaucrats. Ew. That is when a strange ship approaches their city, a ship filled with men and women with black skin claiming the new city is on the very outer edge of their nation. It’s so far away from the people in the nation and took ten years to build, so Skan and Drake are not about to back down. Instead, they go with the foreign people to their nation called Haighlei, ruled by a king. Tradition is key; Haighlei only allows change once every twenty years during an eclipse, so the people can seem backward to the more progressive Shin’a’in.
Shortly after the arrival of Skan’s and Drake’s families, there is a murder in the Haighlei palace. Then another. And another. There weren’t murders before these newcomers, and surely magic was involved, perhaps a kind of magic the Haighlei don’t understand. That’s not possible, though, as the cataclysm still produces aftershocks called mage storms that destroy all spells and make it impossible to use magic. Still, accusations ensue, and Skan and Drake must be careful about ruining their chances of an alliance and maintaining peace.
In my review of The Black Gryphon I complained that I couldn’t tell the cultures of various people apart. Because Ma’ar was conquering loads of land, varied people huddled near Urtho’s tower, suggesting they would not all have the same culture. In The White Gryphon I was pleased to see comparisons between the Shin’a’in and Haighlei — their dress, customs, caste system, ruling class, etc. A servant named Makke, who is more suited to caring for children but was labeled a cleaning woman, is a good example of how Haighlei might need to update their society. Makke can be punished fiercely for losing a single item of laundry, but her closeness to Skan’s family means she provides valuable information for the story.
Although Lackey and Dixon tend to keep their villains in the realm of mustache twisting and mua-ha-ha-ing, this time she gave us someone who scared me. When he had a victim under his control, I never knew if he would talk until help arrived or if he was going to carve someone to pieces. I hadn’t been that worried about the villain since The Last Herald-Mage trilogy, when someone was killing off my favorite characters.
While Makke and the villain stood out, once again the main characters seemed stock. Amberdrake could be any one of the previous Shin’a’in we’ve met in the Valdemar books, and his partner, Winterhart, seems like a standard pretty white lady with good manners. Here, Lackey and Dixon have missed an opportunity. Drake is supposed to play any role that soothes his clients. If they need a friend, lover, good listener, a slap of reality, sternness — he should be able to act, like a character in a play. He’s completely a home base guy, not militaristic, so he should always appear weak physically, to some degree, and perhaps more pacifistic.
Winterhart was very good at playing a role in The Black Gryphon. She hid the fact that she was born a court lady and pretended to be a rough-and-tough gryphon healer. Although she was miserable in her false identity, she was convincing. In The White Gryphon, it’s assumed the Drake and Skan are the leaders of their new city, making them and their families royalty. I would assume Winterhart would revel in delight in her private quarters with Amberdrake, or at least compare her two lives. Instead, she seems like most other female leads in the Valdemar books.
The authors’ writing is redeemed when Amberdrake has to do something rash and brave and he complains the whole time. THAT was what I was looking for! This guy should be so focused on his job as a therapist/masseur/empath that all the murders and political drama should send him running for a hidey hole.
And that is my beef with Valdemar books lately. I see potential. It’s everywhere, and it doesn’t even know it’s potential. You may wonder why I keep reading the Valdemar books. Surely, I can ditch the readalong and convince Jackie to try another series with me. But I don’t want to. Much like rooting for a favorite team that seems to lose too often, Valdemar books fill me with hope. For every shot the characters take and miss, I have a moment of almost jumping up to whoop and cheer!
The biggest disappointment? The numerous painful typos, such as calling Skan “Skin.” What do I look forward to with the conclusion of The Mage Wars trilogy? Well, I have no clue who the “silver gryphon” of The Silver Gryphon is. A new character? Another Skan transformation? We’ll find out.
This review was originally posted at Grab the Lapels.
The war with the evil mage Ma’ar is over and Urtho is dead, but his people have survived. Spread as far across the world as they can, the Shin’a’in tribes must build new homes after theirs was destroyed in a huge magic explosion. We catch up with the gryphon Skandranon, whose feathers are now white after being bleached by the magic gate he crossed to escape the cataclysm in The Black Gryphon.
In The White Gryphon, we begin ten years after the cataclysm. Dubbed king of their new city, the white gryphon sets aside battle and glory for resolving minor conflicts and meetings. He’s not pleased. Skandranon and his human friend Amberdrake both have children now. They’re out of shape. They are bureaucrats. Ew. That is when a strange ship approaches their city, a ship filled with men and women with black skin claiming the new city is on the very outer edge of their nation. It’s so far away from the people in the nation and took ten years to build, so Skan and Drake are not about to back down. Instead, they go with the foreign people to their nation called Haighlei, ruled by a king. Tradition is key; Haighlei only allows change once every twenty years during an eclipse, so the people can seem backward to the more progressive Shin’a’in.
Shortly after the arrival of Skan’s and Drake’s families, there is a murder in the Haighlei palace. Then another. And another. There weren’t murders before these newcomers, and surely magic was involved, perhaps a kind of magic the Haighlei don’t understand. That’s not possible, though, as the cataclysm still produces aftershocks called mage storms that destroy all spells and make it impossible to use magic. Still, accusations ensue, and Skan and Drake must be careful about ruining their chances of an alliance and maintaining peace.
In my review of The Black Gryphon I complained that I couldn’t tell the cultures of various people apart. Because Ma’ar was conquering loads of land, varied people huddled near Urtho’s tower, suggesting they would not all have the same culture. In The White Gryphon I was pleased to see comparisons between the Shin’a’in and Haighlei — their dress, customs, caste system, ruling class, etc. A servant named Makke, who is more suited to caring for children but was labeled a cleaning woman, is a good example of how Haighlei might need to update their society. Makke can be punished fiercely for losing a single item of laundry, but her closeness to Skan’s family means she provides valuable information for the story.
Although Lackey and Dixon tend to keep their villains in the realm of mustache twisting and mua-ha-ha-ing, this time she gave us someone who scared me. When he had a victim under his control, I never knew if he would talk until help arrived or if he was going to carve someone to pieces. I hadn’t been that worried about the villain since The Last Herald-Mage trilogy, when someone was killing off my favorite characters.
While Makke and the villain stood out, once again the main characters seemed stock. Amberdrake could be any one of the previous Shin’a’in we’ve met in the Valdemar books, and his partner, Winterhart, seems like a standard pretty white lady with good manners. Here, Lackey and Dixon have missed an opportunity. Drake is supposed to play any role that soothes his clients. If they need a friend, lover, good listener, a slap of reality, sternness — he should be able to act, like a character in a play. He’s completely a home base guy, not militaristic, so he should always appear weak physically, to some degree, and perhaps more pacifistic.
Winterhart was very good at playing a role in The Black Gryphon. She hid the fact that she was born a court lady and pretended to be a rough-and-tough gryphon healer. Although she was miserable in her false identity, she was convincing. In The White Gryphon, it’s assumed the Drake and Skan are the leaders of their new city, making them and their families royalty. I would assume Winterhart would revel in delight in her private quarters with Amberdrake, or at least compare her two lives. Instead, she seems like most other female leads in the Valdemar books.
The authors’ writing is redeemed when Amberdrake has to do something rash and brave and he complains the whole time. THAT was what I was looking for! This guy should be so focused on his job as a therapist/masseur/empath that all the murders and political drama should send him running for a hidey hole.
And that is my beef with Valdemar books lately. I see potential. It’s everywhere, and it doesn’t even know it’s potential. You may wonder why I keep reading the Valdemar books. Surely, I can ditch the readalong and convince Jackie to try another series with me. But I don’t want to. Much like rooting for a favorite team that seems to lose too often, Valdemar books fill me with hope. For every shot the characters take and miss, I have a moment of almost jumping up to whoop and cheer!
The biggest disappointment? The numerous painful typos, such as calling Skan “Skin.” What do I look forward to with the conclusion of The Mage Wars trilogy? Well, I have no clue who the “silver gryphon” of The Silver Gryphon is. A new character? Another Skan transformation? We’ll find out.
This review was originally posted at Grab the Lapels.
saphirablue's review against another edition
3.0
I like it. Even if it felt more like that I'm reading a murder mystery than a fantasy book, I still like it.
I wish we had more infos about the ten years between the last book and and this one. I want to know about the travel and building the city while being affected by the Mage Storms. :/
I like reading about these characters again and I love Skan and his thoughts and sarkasm. ♥
I also like meeting other people in this world and seeing a bit more about this world. The culuture of this kingdom was interesting and I do wonder how the alliance with White Gryphon and the (hinted at refugees) from the north will influence it.
I wish we had more infos about the ten years between the last book and and this one. I want to know about the travel and building the city while being affected by the Mage Storms. :/
I like reading about these characters again and I love Skan and his thoughts and sarkasm. ♥
I also like meeting other people in this world and seeing a bit more about this world. The culuture of this kingdom was interesting and I do wonder how the alliance with White Gryphon and the (hinted at refugees) from the north will influence it.
yonitdm's review against another edition
3.0
This eBook head so many typos, I'm thinking it's an amateur scan of the physical.
The story was OK. not as good as I've come to expect. Having the same character complain about being in charge and wishing he wasn't too complain about losing the leadership halfway through was created conflict that wasn't necessary.
The story was OK. not as good as I've come to expect. Having the same character complain about being in charge and wishing he wasn't too complain about losing the leadership halfway through was created conflict that wasn't necessary.
bibliotropic's review against another edition
4.0
It’s been a while since I’ve done any work on the Great Valdemar Reread, but now I’m back at it. Can’t let these books languish, after all!
The White Gryphon is the second book of the Mage Wars trilogy, set back in Velgarth’s prehistory. The war itself has ended. Urtho and Ma’ar have been destroyed, and the Kaled’a’in have wandered far to find a new home. Finally they’ve found it, and built into cliff the city they would go on to call White Gryphon, in honour of Skandranon’s new magic-bleached colouring. That’s where this book begins.
It doesn’t stay there long. Most of the book takes place in the lands of the Haighlei, a race of very dark-skinned people from the south, who have a very rigid and intriguing culture. Change can only come when the gods will it, and the opportunity is always at the height of a solar eclipse. Which, coincidentally, is shortly after the White Gryphon envoys make their first appearance at the court of King Shalaman. But diplomatic relations aren’t the only thing they have to worry about. Soon after their arrival, a madman starts visiously murdering members of Shalaman’s court, casting suspicion on the newcomers.
A very typical point of politic intrigue in fantasy novels, but Lackey makes it interesting nevertheless, especially in the setting of a new and — to those from White Gryphon — bafflingly rigid culture.
The tale is told as Lackey tells many of her stories from the Valdemar series – with shifting viewpoints so that we get to see into the mind of nearly every major player in the story. While that does allow us access to information and insight into the characters, it does make it so that very little comes as a surprise, and unfortunately worked against the attempt to build tension. At first the reader isn’t sure who’s committing the murders. Then we’re told. Then the only issue becomes how and when is the murderer going to be caught. But even then, if you’ve read any of Lackey’s novels in the past, you can pretty much predict the ‘when’ of that, because of Lackey’s love of happy endings. I love a happy ending as much as the next person, and it can be nice to read things where you know everything will turn out all right in the end, but when you’re trying to build tension and mystery, that style doesn’t work quite so well.
My main beef with this story is the sheer amount of suspension of disbelief you have to use in order to make all the pieces fit. First, a madman is cast out of White Gryphon, left in the wilds with only a couple of weapons, and common sense dictates that he’s probably going to die, since the lands are warped and wild and he’s just barely equipped to try to handle them. But somehow he travels south in safety, ending in the very same city that Amberdrake and Skan and the rest eventually go. He has no reason to go there. Nobody knows that the Haighlei kingdoms even exist in that area until after he’s removed from the city. And he also has vowed revenge against Amberdrake and the other citizens of White Gryphon, which would have been better served by staying in the area. It’s an awful stretch of the imagination to think that they all ended up in the same place at the same time like that, and that thought nagged at me from the moment that he is revealed as the killer.
But while that is an awfully big pill to swallow, some of it was made up for by the interesting culture that Lackey set up when she created the Haighlei. I’ve always said that one of Lackey’s strongest suits is world- and culture-building, and it shows quite well here. She’s written numerous stories with a fish-out-of-water element to them, but rarely is it on such a grand scale, and it was fun to read about everybody getting baffled by everybody else.
So while this book did have one major fault that I just can’t overlook, on the whole it was still written well, with the same smooth and engaging tone that I’ve come to expect whenever I read any of Lackey’s works. This isn’t particularly an essential book to the Velgarth/Valdemar books as a whole, since I believe the Haighlei get mentioned in maybe one or two other places besides this, and the Kaled’a’in disappear from history for centuries anyway, but essential or not, it was still a good read, and not one that I would voluntarily skip over.
The White Gryphon is the second book of the Mage Wars trilogy, set back in Velgarth’s prehistory. The war itself has ended. Urtho and Ma’ar have been destroyed, and the Kaled’a’in have wandered far to find a new home. Finally they’ve found it, and built into cliff the city they would go on to call White Gryphon, in honour of Skandranon’s new magic-bleached colouring. That’s where this book begins.
It doesn’t stay there long. Most of the book takes place in the lands of the Haighlei, a race of very dark-skinned people from the south, who have a very rigid and intriguing culture. Change can only come when the gods will it, and the opportunity is always at the height of a solar eclipse. Which, coincidentally, is shortly after the White Gryphon envoys make their first appearance at the court of King Shalaman. But diplomatic relations aren’t the only thing they have to worry about. Soon after their arrival, a madman starts visiously murdering members of Shalaman’s court, casting suspicion on the newcomers.
A very typical point of politic intrigue in fantasy novels, but Lackey makes it interesting nevertheless, especially in the setting of a new and — to those from White Gryphon — bafflingly rigid culture.
The tale is told as Lackey tells many of her stories from the Valdemar series – with shifting viewpoints so that we get to see into the mind of nearly every major player in the story. While that does allow us access to information and insight into the characters, it does make it so that very little comes as a surprise, and unfortunately worked against the attempt to build tension. At first the reader isn’t sure who’s committing the murders. Then we’re told. Then the only issue becomes how and when is the murderer going to be caught. But even then, if you’ve read any of Lackey’s novels in the past, you can pretty much predict the ‘when’ of that, because of Lackey’s love of happy endings. I love a happy ending as much as the next person, and it can be nice to read things where you know everything will turn out all right in the end, but when you’re trying to build tension and mystery, that style doesn’t work quite so well.
My main beef with this story is the sheer amount of suspension of disbelief you have to use in order to make all the pieces fit. First, a madman is cast out of White Gryphon, left in the wilds with only a couple of weapons, and common sense dictates that he’s probably going to die, since the lands are warped and wild and he’s just barely equipped to try to handle them. But somehow he travels south in safety, ending in the very same city that Amberdrake and Skan and the rest eventually go. He has no reason to go there. Nobody knows that the Haighlei kingdoms even exist in that area until after he’s removed from the city. And he also has vowed revenge against Amberdrake and the other citizens of White Gryphon, which would have been better served by staying in the area. It’s an awful stretch of the imagination to think that they all ended up in the same place at the same time like that, and that thought nagged at me from the moment that he is revealed as the killer.
But while that is an awfully big pill to swallow, some of it was made up for by the interesting culture that Lackey set up when she created the Haighlei. I’ve always said that one of Lackey’s strongest suits is world- and culture-building, and it shows quite well here. She’s written numerous stories with a fish-out-of-water element to them, but rarely is it on such a grand scale, and it was fun to read about everybody getting baffled by everybody else.
So while this book did have one major fault that I just can’t overlook, on the whole it was still written well, with the same smooth and engaging tone that I’ve come to expect whenever I read any of Lackey’s works. This isn’t particularly an essential book to the Velgarth/Valdemar books as a whole, since I believe the Haighlei get mentioned in maybe one or two other places besides this, and the Kaled’a’in disappear from history for centuries anyway, but essential or not, it was still a good read, and not one that I would voluntarily skip over.