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A review by dawn_marie
Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny
1.0
I had a really hard time with Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny. The story started out well enough; the protagonist (Corwin) wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of how he got there or who he is. Through deduction, skullduggery, and outright threats, Corwin learns he has a sister in New York and makes his way to her.
The writing style and prose were very choppy; Mr. Zelazny's prose vacillated between simple and direct, flowery and old fashioned with some trips into unpleasant and weird. I have no issues reading old-timey styled fantasy, or flowery speech, or even weird twists . . . but please just pick one and stick with it. There were times when Corwin's inner dialog sounded very modern (well modern for 1970s when the books were originally published) and other times where he sounded like he stepped out of the 14th century. The weird narrative choices - including use of first person narrative were we were told (and not shown) things - were not helped by extremely odd pacing choices: the narrator (Corwin) goes into great detail to describe the clothes he buys, the food he eats, or the long walk he takes but describes various battle sequences simply as "there some guys who attacked us and two of then died."
I found being inside Corwin's head unpleasant - I did not like him, or his sister, or his brothers, or anyone else in this story. They're all terrible, selfish, people. Normally I do not have an issue reading about unpleasant individuals - if they are written well (see Joe Abercrombie). There were no well written characters in this series. I could forgive the flat characters if the plot was interesting.
Nine Princes in Amber had neither well developed characters or an engaging plot. The writing style was inconsistent and the pacing erratic. On top of that there were tons of errors (spelling, double words, malaprops, homonyms, misplaced words, stray punctuation marks) that interrupted the reading flow - - really, Zelazny estate, get better editors.
Additional Amber stories are going to be a hard pass for me.
The writing style and prose were very choppy; Mr. Zelazny's prose vacillated between simple and direct, flowery and old fashioned with some trips into unpleasant and weird. I have no issues reading old-timey styled fantasy, or flowery speech, or even weird twists . . . but please just pick one and stick with it. There were times when Corwin's inner dialog sounded very modern (well modern for 1970s when the books were originally published) and other times where he sounded like he stepped out of the 14th century. The weird narrative choices - including use of first person narrative were we were told (and not shown) things - were not helped by extremely odd pacing choices: the narrator (Corwin) goes into great detail to describe the clothes he buys, the food he eats, or the long walk he takes but describes various battle sequences simply as "there some guys who attacked us and two of then died."
I found being inside Corwin's head unpleasant - I did not like him, or his sister, or his brothers, or anyone else in this story. They're all terrible, selfish, people. Normally I do not have an issue reading about unpleasant individuals - if they are written well (see Joe Abercrombie). There were no well written characters in this series. I could forgive the flat characters if the plot was interesting.
Nine Princes in Amber had neither well developed characters or an engaging plot. The writing style was inconsistent and the pacing erratic. On top of that there were tons of errors (spelling, double words, malaprops, homonyms, misplaced words, stray punctuation marks) that interrupted the reading flow - - really, Zelazny estate, get better editors.
Additional Amber stories are going to be a hard pass for me.