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sailor_marmar's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
smitchy's review against another edition
5.0
I love the use of old fairy tales and the descriptive language of the story. I did have to pull out the dictionary a few times though.
jinkis's review
I was enthralled by the first books uncertainty towards what the protagonist is, once that was discovered, I felt my interest fade rapidly and I struggled to remain interested enough to continue this sequel.
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.
aly_anne's review against another edition
5.0
Still one of my favourite reads, even a decade plus after the first time reading it. The author borrows heavily from Scottish folklore, which almost makes the wights more realistic when reading. And having a strong and resourceful main character is a major plus. Love love love.
annick's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Diverse cast of characters? No
4.75
I’ve read this at least eight times over the past 21 years. I still enjoy it. It has an episodic quality to the questing and adventures.
The author enjoys using antiquated vocabulary. I think of it as a blend of folklore from the british and Irish isles, Rossetti’s Goblins Market, and high fantasy.
The author enjoys using antiquated vocabulary. I think of it as a blend of folklore from the british and Irish isles, Rossetti’s Goblins Market, and high fantasy.
Content Warnings
Minor: Adult/minor relationship and Violence
annick's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
One of my favourites. I’ve read it at least seven times since first discovering it in 2002. Still enjoying it.
anovelstart's review against another edition
4.0
In this second instalment, Rohain has her voice back and also her face. She disguises herself and goes to court as Rohain of the Sorrow Isles so she can gain an audience with the King-Emperor. During this book her goals are to regain her memory and to hopefully see Thorn again, a kind warrior of the King-Emperor's who saved her and her companion in the first book.
Near the end of the book Rohain starts having memory flashes, introducing the reader to the world of the golden-haired race that has long been dwindling in recent times. To see anyone with natural blonde hair is very rare. We gain more knowledge through stories of the Faraen. I quite like this because the more they are mentioned in the first book, the more the reader wonders what happened to them, so it's nice that the author actually answers the unasked question.
One fact I like about this series is at the beginning of each chapter, there's a little verse of poetry relevant to the chapter. Each is 'written' by someone in the book, e.g. a commoner of the land, a song of a well known bard, etc. I think this is a nice unique touch.
Again, this second installment does not disappoint. The author keeps to the same level of detail and introduces riddles and more twists to the story. Rohain's past is quite interesting and the romance of Rohain and Thorn is also quite cute. I'd still recommend this book but only if you've read the first, otherwise there's no way you could understand it.
Enjoy.
Near the end of the book Rohain starts having memory flashes, introducing the reader to the world of the golden-haired race that has long been dwindling in recent times. To see anyone with natural blonde hair is very rare. We gain more knowledge through stories of the Faraen. I quite like this because the more they are mentioned in the first book, the more the reader wonders what happened to them, so it's nice that the author actually answers the unasked question.
One fact I like about this series is at the beginning of each chapter, there's a little verse of poetry relevant to the chapter. Each is 'written' by someone in the book, e.g. a commoner of the land, a song of a well known bard, etc. I think this is a nice unique touch.
Again, this second installment does not disappoint. The author keeps to the same level of detail and introduces riddles and more twists to the story. Rohain's past is quite interesting and the romance of Rohain and Thorn is also quite cute. I'd still recommend this book but only if you've read the first, otherwise there's no way you could understand it.
Enjoy.
twas's review against another edition
3.0
The continuation of The Ill-Made Mute.
Imhrien becomes a lady of the court, and ends up dodging attacks from ill-intentioned humans and fey creatures.
Why does Thorn fall in love with her? Because she's humble? Or beautiful? or because he disregards the fact that loving her is actually rather cruel?
I don't know. I did sort of enjoy reading about Imhrien fumbling through life at court like any one of us would, and the events of her journey northward are exciting.
Again, I love the legendary fey creatures that Thornton weaves in, and again, the serendipity of her travails and travels wore on me.
Imhrien becomes a lady of the court, and ends up dodging attacks from ill-intentioned humans and fey creatures.
Why does Thorn fall in love with her? Because she's humble? Or beautiful? or because he disregards the fact that loving her is actually rather cruel?
I don't know. I did sort of enjoy reading about Imhrien fumbling through life at court like any one of us would, and the events of her journey northward are exciting.
Again, I love the legendary fey creatures that Thornton weaves in, and again, the serendipity of her travails and travels wore on me.