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A review by bibliotropic
Redoubt by Mercedes Lackey
4.0
Following the events of Changes, this fourth book of Mercedes Lackey’s Collegium Chronicles series brings is back into Mags’s life after an unclear amount of time has passed. I say unclear because there are many hints that it takes place very shortly after Changes, only Mags has mysteriously lost the vast majority of his ‘uncultured’ accent, quicker than anything believable could account for. On one hand, it was nice to cease having to puzzle out everything that Mags was trying to say, since writing accents is a fine art that few can master. On the other hand, I can’t really think of a believable reason for it to have mostly vanished so quickly.
Anyway, moving on.
As a counter to the very slow plot development of the second and third books, Redoubt picks up the pace nicely. There’s still a lot of emphasis on Kirball, but at least there’s a greater emphasis now placed on Mags developing his skills as Nikolas’s second, agent and spy for the Crown of Valdemar. And the second half of the book ramps things up even further, by having Mags kidnapped by people working through Karse but for their own sinister purposes.
There are some very touching scenes later on about cross-cultural bonds and the importance of letting good will transcend borders on a map, which I admit, the softy in me enjoyed reading. Most interesting, though, were the dropped hints about Mags’s heritage (from a place that isn’t even on the maps, which wipes out most theories I initially had about his origins), and the way Mags has been made something of an emissary of Vkandis, patron deity of Karse. I wonder mostly how this is going to affect the Valdemaran timeline of events. I can’t see Mags being too successful in this endeavour, since Karse and Valdemar didn’t really open up to each other until the Storms trilogy (taking place hundreds of years after these books), but it will be interesting to see where that plot thread leads.
I do have a major nitpick with this book, though, that was probably meant as a simple refresher to readers but instead comes across as lazy writing and a desperate need to meet a wordcount quota. Mags experiencing a lot of flashbacks in this book, flashbacks to events that happened in previous Collegium Chronicles novels, and those flashbacks are wholesale liftings of entire passages from those books. Only minor editing when the memory is deliberate demonstrated to be a false one, but otherwise the text is utterly identical. Perhaps not so egregious if it’s been a while since one has read the rest of the series, but painful when one is reading them in quick succession. I was able to skip a dozen or more pages because they were the exact same text that I’d read a few days prior, with nothing new added, and it only served to tell me that Mags was remembering things.
Lackey rekindled my interest in the series with this book, which was a very pleasant surprise after the mess of the previous two books. It ends on enough of a cliffhanger to leave readers wondering and wanting to read the fifth book, Bastion, which I shall be doing soon so that I can see what resolutions are reached and what new information is revealed. Mags has been an interesting character to see grow and change as the story has gone on, he’s much more mature now than when he started, and I expect that the real action is soon to come.
Anyway, moving on.
As a counter to the very slow plot development of the second and third books, Redoubt picks up the pace nicely. There’s still a lot of emphasis on Kirball, but at least there’s a greater emphasis now placed on Mags developing his skills as Nikolas’s second, agent and spy for the Crown of Valdemar. And the second half of the book ramps things up even further, by having Mags kidnapped by people working through Karse but for their own sinister purposes.
There are some very touching scenes later on about cross-cultural bonds and the importance of letting good will transcend borders on a map, which I admit, the softy in me enjoyed reading. Most interesting, though, were the dropped hints about Mags’s heritage (from a place that isn’t even on the maps, which wipes out most theories I initially had about his origins), and the way Mags has been made something of an emissary of Vkandis, patron deity of Karse. I wonder mostly how this is going to affect the Valdemaran timeline of events. I can’t see Mags being too successful in this endeavour, since Karse and Valdemar didn’t really open up to each other until the Storms trilogy (taking place hundreds of years after these books), but it will be interesting to see where that plot thread leads.
I do have a major nitpick with this book, though, that was probably meant as a simple refresher to readers but instead comes across as lazy writing and a desperate need to meet a wordcount quota. Mags experiencing a lot of flashbacks in this book, flashbacks to events that happened in previous Collegium Chronicles novels, and those flashbacks are wholesale liftings of entire passages from those books. Only minor editing when the memory is deliberate demonstrated to be a false one, but otherwise the text is utterly identical. Perhaps not so egregious if it’s been a while since one has read the rest of the series, but painful when one is reading them in quick succession. I was able to skip a dozen or more pages because they were the exact same text that I’d read a few days prior, with nothing new added, and it only served to tell me that Mags was remembering things.
Lackey rekindled my interest in the series with this book, which was a very pleasant surprise after the mess of the previous two books. It ends on enough of a cliffhanger to leave readers wondering and wanting to read the fifth book, Bastion, which I shall be doing soon so that I can see what resolutions are reached and what new information is revealed. Mags has been an interesting character to see grow and change as the story has gone on, he’s much more mature now than when he started, and I expect that the real action is soon to come.