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A review by caedocyon
The Quartered Sea by Tanya Huff
2.0
I was gonna give it 3, but I talked myself down to 2. 2.5? Brainless high fantasy reading, the first I've read in a long time. I haven't read any of the other books in the series (though I think I've read other Tanya Huff books); I got this at random from a BookCrossing site.
The world is pretty boring---an "elemental magic!1" spin on Valdemar. There are a few interesting and original bits of magic, but the magic/music connection is a little overdone at this point. How about magic/plumbing or something? Oh wait, Tamora Pierce covered that. Anyway, you know things are a tad underdeveloped when you don't find out what instrument Benedikt plays until 3/4 of the way through the book. (Early on, he puts his "instrument case" away. Whut?)
Benedikt is a dickhead in the classic Vanyel (Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar) sense, with the difference that I could actually stand to read an entire book about him and that other characters seem to realize that he's a dickhead. Character development is the obvious plot, but by the end of the book he's still going "Waaaah my life is so hard! I can only sing the best water in the history of the planet! Waaaaaaah!" Also everyone wants to have sex with him, to the point that it isalmost funny. I am not even kidding, everyone. When someone hears that he's dead, her first reaction is "Damn, I really wanted to bone him when he had grown up a bit and stopped being so self-absorbed." (Paraphrased less than you might think.) Benedikt, of course, finds it such a hardship that people want to have sex with him all the time. Even though he gets constant boners, at a rate of every twenty pages or so.
There's a lot of ostentatious permissiveness of same-sex relationships and not many actual same-sex relationships. Benedikt's own (human) love life manages to be both somewhat important to the plot and completely chaste and barren. Not to mention the bit where it's clumsily foreshadowed and doesn't make a lick of sense, but who's counting?
But overall I was pretty entertained and I wanted to finish it quickly rather than put it down. For what the book is, my biggest complaint is that the ending was far too sudden and felt like a cop-out.
The world is pretty boring---an "elemental magic!1" spin on Valdemar. There are a few interesting and original bits of magic, but the magic/music connection is a little overdone at this point. How about magic/plumbing or something? Oh wait, Tamora Pierce covered that. Anyway, you know things are a tad underdeveloped when you don't find out what instrument Benedikt plays until 3/4 of the way through the book. (Early on, he puts his "instrument case" away. Whut?)
Benedikt is a dickhead in the classic Vanyel (Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar) sense, with the difference that I could actually stand to read an entire book about him and that other characters seem to realize that he's a dickhead. Character development is the obvious plot, but by the end of the book he's still going "Waaaah my life is so hard! I can only sing the best water in the history of the planet! Waaaaaaah!" Also everyone wants to have sex with him, to the point that it is
There's a lot of ostentatious permissiveness of same-sex relationships and not many actual same-sex relationships. Benedikt's own (human) love life manages to be both somewhat important to the plot and completely chaste and barren. Not to mention the bit where it's clumsily foreshadowed and doesn't make a lick of sense, but who's counting?
But overall I was pretty entertained and I wanted to finish it quickly rather than put it down. For what the book is, my biggest complaint is that the ending was far too sudden and felt like a cop-out.