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sailor_marmar's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
catz853's review against another edition
2.0
The trilogy started out with potential, despite the extreme wordiness and overly detailed description. It was almost comical at times - like the half-page list of trade goods to the tower… in alphabetical order. The author has an expansive vocabulary, which was interesting at times but annoying at others. A mute, scarred protagonist was also intriguing but wasn’t sustained past the magical cure at the end of the first book.
The second book fell into all the standard racialized and sexist tropes of fantasy that we should have left behind decades ago. I persevered, though.
By the middle of the third book, I was ready for Morrigan to kill them all off just to finish the endless journey that seemed more focused on introducing new elements of world building, creatures, and geography (really should be done most of that by book 3…) than actually advancing what little plot remained.
If you like clichéd fantasy with pages and pages of description, this series is for you.
The second book fell into all the standard racialized and sexist tropes of fantasy that we should have left behind decades ago. I persevered, though.
By the middle of the third book, I was ready for Morrigan to kill them all off just to finish the endless journey that seemed more focused on introducing new elements of world building, creatures, and geography (really should be done most of that by book 3…) than actually advancing what little plot remained.
If you like clichéd fantasy with pages and pages of description, this series is for you.
smitchy's review against another edition
5.0
Loved it. But yes I struggled to accept the ending. But when I had thought about it for a while I realized that there really was no other way to end the story. Remember people: most traditional fairy tales are not happy endings. They are cautionary tales about dealing with the supernatural. Disney has written happy endings not in the original stories. Did I want a Disney ending? Absolutely! Did I enjoy the book anyway? Loved it!!
mdunnbass's review against another edition
1.0
(This is a joint review for the entire trilogy. No spoilers)
So, the first book in the trilogy is titled The Ill-Made Mute. I highly recommend it. Now, a large part of the book is very hard to wade through. I would not be surprised if this woman had earned a doctorate in pre-Industrial Celtic and Anglo-Saxon folk tales and legends. She incorporates almost every known folk tale from these cultures as a bona-fide part of her world. The Great Hunt rides at night, seelie and un-seelie wights await at every turn, and more or less every superstition is held as gospel. The woman uses a few Gaelic terms here and there, and much of the spellings, and many of the names, are Celtic.
This can get very distracting.
There will be long, drawn out 20 page passages where she basically just retells a folk tale for the reader, without any of the book's characters participating, just listening to the tale be told, or she'll even pause the action entirely to give this as a 20 page aside. And when words like Fithiach, Imrhien and Each Uisage are used at whims, the book can sometimes be hard to wade through.
But, the tale was amazing, and she is perhaps the best author I've read at being able to make the world around you seem alive. Never before have I read a book where the author evokes in me the thoughts and feelings I had as a child going camping. Every odd noise in the woods was some animal, or a sprite of some kind just out of sight, playing games with our fears. The world is truly alive around you. This was a whole new type of fantasy writing.
The tale itself concerns a disfigured mute amnesiac (say that three times fast) who stumbles out of a collapsed mineshaft and is taken in by some type of scullery maid or something. The whole tale is told third person limited, so we only know of the world what this mute knows, which is nothing. It's a great way to introduce the world to us. And what a world it is. There's apparently 2 metals in this world not in ours, sildron and allium. Sildron has the peculiar magnetic property of repelling gravity. Allium, when placed between sildron and earth, nullifies this anti-grav effect. Thus, a whole culture of airborne messengers riding winged horses with sildron-shod feet arises. There are huge sailing ships, akin to the British Navy of the 1700s, with their external hulls lined with sildron, and movable allium covers (allowing them to change their amount of lift). Combine all this with a typical medieval fantasy world, and add in all the folk legends, and you have one helluva new world.
Despite what may sound like a few big flags and complaints on my end, I fully suggest everyone read it, if for nothing else than a look at a refreshing new fantasy world, and a completely different writing style than any I've ever come across before.
I liked it enough to want to buy the rest of the trilogy
Partly because of the novelty of her writing style, and partly because Book II (The Lady of the Sorrows) had a character named The Lady Dianella in it. So, back during my latest Barnes and Noble buying spree I picked up the second and third (The Battle of Evernight) books.
The cool thing is, about 3/4 of the way through book 2 (The Lady of the Sorrows), some very cool plot developments arise that make you realize she probably planned out and wrote all three books before anyone even saw 1 page of them, and that they are very cooly thought out and planned. And there is some exciting action and interesting plot twists. Many kudos to her for a well thought out series. She also knows her geology and botany.
The problem, however, is that the 20 page asides have grow both in frequency and length, and instead of being a decent quest fantasy, it somehow rapidly turned into a harlequin romance. Or at least, a bunch of Victorian type damsels at court pining and wisting away in very flowery language over the same, graceful, exquisitely handsome (sorry, comely), sensitive, caring, and understanding man. There was even mention somewhere about a woman being proud that the one thing she was able to give to the man who had everything was the most marvelous gift of all, the once given and always cherished maidenhead. Yes, that was how she described it. Or maybe he described it that way. Either way, the books weren't what I bargained for. I found myself skimming 20, 30, 60 page passages at a time simply to getback to a plot and some semblance of a break from internal dialogues. This is the first time I've skipped chunks of a book since I tried to read Dr. Zhivago entirely in 1 night, for a quiz the next morning. (It didn't go well at all)
Also, the novel writing style she had in the first book becomes bloated and amplified, so that every description is a long string of alliteration, metaphor, and hyperbole, not to mention anthropomorphization. I mean, passages like, "the book of night opened across the sky, it's paragraphs written in constellations" can be very cool, but when that's the shortest, clearest, and most direct description of nightfall the woman can come up with (and believe me, there were many many more in the book, all of them long and pointless ways of saying "it was nighttime") - then there's an editor somewhere sound asleep at her desk, or just not showing up for work. This woman can make Robert Jordan's descriptive style seem sparse and insufficient.
Anyway, skipping to the end... In the paperback version I have of the third book (The Battle of Evernight), there is a one-page epilogue/Author's Note that says, in a nutshell, that when the first edition of the third book came out, no one could understand the ending. Not that they couldn't see how the characters could do whatever it is they did, but that no one was at all clear on what happened. Apparently, there was enough confusion about this that the author felt it necessary (in the paperback release) to include a few paragraphs explaining, in layman's terms, exactly what happened in clear and understandable language.
So, the first book in the trilogy is titled The Ill-Made Mute. I highly recommend it. Now, a large part of the book is very hard to wade through. I would not be surprised if this woman had earned a doctorate in pre-Industrial Celtic and Anglo-Saxon folk tales and legends. She incorporates almost every known folk tale from these cultures as a bona-fide part of her world. The Great Hunt rides at night, seelie and un-seelie wights await at every turn, and more or less every superstition is held as gospel. The woman uses a few Gaelic terms here and there, and much of the spellings, and many of the names, are Celtic.
This can get very distracting.
There will be long, drawn out 20 page passages where she basically just retells a folk tale for the reader, without any of the book's characters participating, just listening to the tale be told, or she'll even pause the action entirely to give this as a 20 page aside. And when words like Fithiach, Imrhien and Each Uisage are used at whims, the book can sometimes be hard to wade through.
But, the tale was amazing, and she is perhaps the best author I've read at being able to make the world around you seem alive. Never before have I read a book where the author evokes in me the thoughts and feelings I had as a child going camping. Every odd noise in the woods was some animal, or a sprite of some kind just out of sight, playing games with our fears. The world is truly alive around you. This was a whole new type of fantasy writing.
The tale itself concerns a disfigured mute amnesiac (say that three times fast) who stumbles out of a collapsed mineshaft and is taken in by some type of scullery maid or something. The whole tale is told third person limited, so we only know of the world what this mute knows, which is nothing. It's a great way to introduce the world to us. And what a world it is. There's apparently 2 metals in this world not in ours, sildron and allium. Sildron has the peculiar magnetic property of repelling gravity. Allium, when placed between sildron and earth, nullifies this anti-grav effect. Thus, a whole culture of airborne messengers riding winged horses with sildron-shod feet arises. There are huge sailing ships, akin to the British Navy of the 1700s, with their external hulls lined with sildron, and movable allium covers (allowing them to change their amount of lift). Combine all this with a typical medieval fantasy world, and add in all the folk legends, and you have one helluva new world.
Despite what may sound like a few big flags and complaints on my end, I fully suggest everyone read it, if for nothing else than a look at a refreshing new fantasy world, and a completely different writing style than any I've ever come across before.
I liked it enough to want to buy the rest of the trilogy
Partly because of the novelty of her writing style, and partly because Book II (The Lady of the Sorrows) had a character named The Lady Dianella in it. So, back during my latest Barnes and Noble buying spree I picked up the second and third (The Battle of Evernight) books.
The cool thing is, about 3/4 of the way through book 2 (The Lady of the Sorrows), some very cool plot developments arise that make you realize she probably planned out and wrote all three books before anyone even saw 1 page of them, and that they are very cooly thought out and planned. And there is some exciting action and interesting plot twists. Many kudos to her for a well thought out series. She also knows her geology and botany.
The problem, however, is that the 20 page asides have grow both in frequency and length, and instead of being a decent quest fantasy, it somehow rapidly turned into a harlequin romance. Or at least, a bunch of Victorian type damsels at court pining and wisting away in very flowery language over the same, graceful, exquisitely handsome (sorry, comely), sensitive, caring, and understanding man. There was even mention somewhere about a woman being proud that the one thing she was able to give to the man who had everything was the most marvelous gift of all, the once given and always cherished maidenhead. Yes, that was how she described it. Or maybe he described it that way. Either way, the books weren't what I bargained for. I found myself skimming 20, 30, 60 page passages at a time simply to getback to a plot and some semblance of a break from internal dialogues. This is the first time I've skipped chunks of a book since I tried to read Dr. Zhivago entirely in 1 night, for a quiz the next morning. (It didn't go well at all)
Also, the novel writing style she had in the first book becomes bloated and amplified, so that every description is a long string of alliteration, metaphor, and hyperbole, not to mention anthropomorphization. I mean, passages like, "the book of night opened across the sky, it's paragraphs written in constellations" can be very cool, but when that's the shortest, clearest, and most direct description of nightfall the woman can come up with (and believe me, there were many many more in the book, all of them long and pointless ways of saying "it was nighttime") - then there's an editor somewhere sound asleep at her desk, or just not showing up for work. This woman can make Robert Jordan's descriptive style seem sparse and insufficient.
Anyway, skipping to the end... In the paperback version I have of the third book (The Battle of Evernight), there is a one-page epilogue/Author's Note that says, in a nutshell, that when the first edition of the third book came out, no one could understand the ending. Not that they couldn't see how the characters could do whatever it is they did, but that no one was at all clear on what happened. Apparently, there was enough confusion about this that the author felt it necessary (in the paperback release) to include a few paragraphs explaining, in layman's terms, exactly what happened in clear and understandable language.
ponderinstuff's review against another edition
1.0
I usually like this Australian author because her fiction/fantasy books are unique, however this one just dragged too much to hold my interest. I didn't even finish it. I just now put it down and won't be picking it up again, so can someone tell me what happens at the end of the book?
I will still read the next book this author puts out, but if I don't enjoy that one, I will probably take Cecilia Dart-Thornton off my favorite fantasy authors list. But I will give her another chance since I've enjoyed past books. :-)
I will still read the next book this author puts out, but if I don't enjoy that one, I will probably take Cecilia Dart-Thornton off my favorite fantasy authors list. But I will give her another chance since I've enjoyed past books. :-)
annick's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.5
Still leaves me feeling bereft. I have read this book at least eight times in the past 21 years. And it is still a favourite. The book has some flaws of pacing and plotting but I still enjoy it and recommend it to others.
The ending is a moving one. Leaves me sad and frustrated. Still after all these years. … So I’m off to read the extra epilogue from the special edition.
The ending is a moving one. Leaves me sad and frustrated. Still after all these years. … So I’m off to read the extra epilogue from the special edition.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, War, and Violence
Minor: Body shaming
echo86's review against another edition
1.0
Really struggled through this one. By now I feel that our main character has lost most of her personality and I'm unable to come up with a good reason that her friends follow her. Very heavy on the romance without much substance. Shame as I like the first book when she was scarred and mute - funny how that made her a more interesting character!
anovelstart's review
4.0
In the third installment of this tale, the story continues to flow smoothly and in a logical manner. At times the description can be a little over the top by using a few too many examples for the reader (one or two would suffice). In the authors defence, I think she may have got a little excited and got carried away at these points because it's normally during the action-packed parts of the story (or just before).
A lot happens in this book, the events are very vivid and have the reader on edge until everything is ok again. A lot more unfolds in this story, especially now that she knows who she is and is remembering more and more of her past. The story holds quite a few unexpected twists which can be quite exciting.
Without giving too much of the book away, it's a definite read if you've read the other two books. It sums up the story nicely. The only thing I would have changed is the ending is written in such a way that lets the reader make up their own mind. Personally I prefer it when the author just tells you otherwise it leaves me to think that they couldn't make up their mind and want to leave it to you instead. So basically, the ending needs a little time to sink in and get your head around, but considering the mysteries in the book and discovering the world of Erith, it's definitely worth it.
A lot happens in this book, the events are very vivid and have the reader on edge until everything is ok again. A lot more unfolds in this story, especially now that she knows who she is and is remembering more and more of her past. The story holds quite a few unexpected twists which can be quite exciting.
Without giving too much of the book away, it's a definite read if you've read the other two books. It sums up the story nicely. The only thing I would have changed is the ending is written in such a way that lets the reader make up their own mind. Personally I prefer it when the author just tells you otherwise it leaves me to think that they couldn't make up their mind and want to leave it to you instead. So basically, the ending needs a little time to sink in and get your head around, but considering the mysteries in the book and discovering the world of Erith, it's definitely worth it.
ponderinstuff's review
1.0
I usually like this Australian author because her fiction/fantasy books are unique, however this one just dragged too much to hold my interest. I didn't even finish it. I just now put it down and won't be picking it up again, so can someone tell me what happens at the end of the book?
I will still read the next book this author puts out, but if I don't enjoy that one, I will probably take Cecilia Dart-Thornton off my favorite fantasy authors list. But I will give her another chance since I've enjoyed past books. :-)
I will still read the next book this author puts out, but if I don't enjoy that one, I will probably take Cecilia Dart-Thornton off my favorite fantasy authors list. But I will give her another chance since I've enjoyed past books. :-)
twas's review
3.0
(See reviews of prequels.) There are a few things that bother me about this one.... What is Thorn doing asking a mortal to marry him? Why does Imhrien move from that spot, thus losing everything? Why is there a stupid happy ending somewhat ambiguously tacked on, not even incorporated into a chapter, and just sort of suggesting that everything works out the way every little girl hopes it would?
I may never know. But to the book's credit, I was with Imhrien all the way, hoping that she would survive, perhaps even hoping she would get her prince. Even so, I was disappointed with how Thornton crafted the ending.
I may never know. But to the book's credit, I was with Imhrien all the way, hoping that she would survive, perhaps even hoping she would get her prince. Even so, I was disappointed with how Thornton crafted the ending.