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A review by studiomikarts
The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey, Larry Dixon
Did not finish book. Stopped at 33%.
I feel regretful DNFing this book (and the series altogether), but I have to be honest with myself and move on. Life is too short to spend time reading a book you don't enjoy. This series was what got me into gryphon fantasy in the first place, something that has grown over the decades and become a huge part of my life. But I originally read this series when I was in junior high school. I have no memory of that experience, no memory of the story or how I felt about it at the time. I only know that my mind was irrevocably opened to the idea that there are more than dragons and unicorns in the fantasy world.
This marks the second time I've tried to read this book in my adult life and I quickly see now why I reached the halfway point last time and then set the book down for almost ten full years before trying again. For one, the hyperviolence feels arbitrary (gryphons being skinned alive in flight, being tortured gruesomely until they literally beg for death, etc.), a clumsy, over-employed device for establishing the evil of the antagonists. This probably didn't bother me as a young teenager, but it does now. I have much more reading experience and I know the same effect could have been achieved in more subtle and crafty ways. Second, the proper names are a nightmare to keep straight. Perhaps this book is relying on the reader to have read other books in the series, and therefore to know who and what these people, races, creatures, and places are, but I think that's a bad idea in any multi-book series, and especially here, where so many of the names seem to have been pulled out of thin air. They make my mind stumble and have to pick itself up every time they punctuate the text. Skandranon, the chief character, is perhaps the worst. I constantly find myself re-reading the name to make sure it's coming out right in my head. Skandragon? Skrandranon? Standranon? No, Skan-dra-non. It's exhausting to have to read like this! The suspension of disbelief requires a basis in reality. Names like these, that don't seem to be based on any existing naming pattern, become a distracting mouthful and choke the reader, even when they're reading silently.
In my mind, all these years, I never realized what kind of books these actually were, I think. I imagined a book series that opened the world of fantasy gryphons to me, even though I must have read them in their entirety only once. My memory of the junior high school library itself is stronger than my memory of this book, and my memory of this book doesn't fit with the reality, because I imagined it, based on the good thing it did for me, not on the actual contents.
This marks the second time I've tried to read this book in my adult life and I quickly see now why I reached the halfway point last time and then set the book down for almost ten full years before trying again. For one, the hyperviolence feels arbitrary (gryphons being skinned alive in flight, being tortured gruesomely until they literally beg for death, etc.), a clumsy, over-employed device for establishing the evil of the antagonists. This probably didn't bother me as a young teenager, but it does now. I have much more reading experience and I know the same effect could have been achieved in more subtle and crafty ways. Second, the proper names are a nightmare to keep straight. Perhaps this book is relying on the reader to have read other books in the series, and therefore to know who and what these people, races, creatures, and places are, but I think that's a bad idea in any multi-book series, and especially here, where so many of the names seem to have been pulled out of thin air. They make my mind stumble and have to pick itself up every time they punctuate the text. Skandranon, the chief character, is perhaps the worst. I constantly find myself re-reading the name to make sure it's coming out right in my head. Skandragon? Skrandranon? Standranon? No, Skan-dra-non. It's exhausting to have to read like this! The suspension of disbelief requires a basis in reality. Names like these, that don't seem to be based on any existing naming pattern, become a distracting mouthful and choke the reader, even when they're reading silently.
In my mind, all these years, I never realized what kind of books these actually were, I think. I imagined a book series that opened the world of fantasy gryphons to me, even though I must have read them in their entirety only once. My memory of the junior high school library itself is stronger than my memory of this book, and my memory of this book doesn't fit with the reality, because I imagined it, based on the good thing it did for me, not on the actual contents.