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A review by avidbeader
Gryphon in Light by Mercedes Lackey
1.0
I think I am ready to part ways with Mercedes Lackey. I've been dissatisfied with many aspects of the various series that back-filled the history of Valdemar and its surrounding nations, going back to the Alberich duology that couldn't even be bothered to keep the same name for Elspeth's father, much less the basic details about his actions and death. So many pages wasted on the origins of kirball in the Foundation series, an activity with zero mention even as wargames or training in other books. The series about Valdemar's founding that has the Eastern Empire relying on a giant maguffin in the Dolls before managing to take it away completely since there's no hint of it in the Mage Storms series. These things on top of the constant continuity errors that have me wondering just what DAW is doing, since they clearly aren't paying editors to go over these books and check things.
The pacing in this specific book is entirely out of whack. We get a conflict tossed at us with minimal explanation, when some time spent showing how it developed would have helped draw readers in and care more when Kelvren turns up to put an end to it. Then we take the middle almost 80% of the book to basically gather the characters that will be carrying the presumed second and third books and introduce the new ones. Imagine that the DM of your RPG campaign let that natural 20 completely end something interesting and then spent the next several weeks having you prepare for the next campaign and, by the way, adding a new friend with a random character to work in every session.
I wouldn't even quite mind so much the cast of new characters that feels like Lackey throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, except that we get very little time with established characters who ought to be there, with no explanation as to why they aren't around. For example, this conflict takes place in the same setting as the series about Darian Firkin, yet even though he's mentioned in passing several times as clearly being important, he only shows up twice that I remember and his partner Keisha doesn't appear on-page at all. And even with the characters that are there, their actions and interactions are swallowed up by Lackey's latest twists in her magic system that do not make sense and had me skimming pages to find the next bit of actual plot.
The cliffhanger at the end was ridiculous and unnecessary and could just as easily have opened the next book. The continuity errors within the book as well as with previous books made it feel sloppy. A lot of time is spent on telling us how Firesong is dealing with constant pain and discomfort, but not clearly saying whether it's due to the events from the Mage Storms series (and never mentioned in the Darian series), aging (which contradicts established canon of both Hawkbrothers and mages being long-lived if they don't die by conflict), or something new, which could easily be whatever's brewing in this series, in which I'd expect Firesong and his friends to be a lot more worried from the get-go instead of just trying to ease him. Surprises are tossed in at random, such as
I've been getting Lackey's books from the library for decades now, and at this point I think I will wait for reviews before even going that far.
The pacing in this specific book is entirely out of whack. We get a conflict tossed at us with minimal explanation, when some time spent showing how it developed would have helped draw readers in and care more when Kelvren turns up to put an end to it. Then we take the middle almost 80% of the book to basically gather the characters that will be carrying the presumed second and third books and introduce the new ones. Imagine that the DM of your RPG campaign let that natural 20 completely end something interesting and then spent the next several weeks having you prepare for the next campaign and, by the way, adding a new friend with a random character to work in every session.
I wouldn't even quite mind so much the cast of new characters that feels like Lackey throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, except that we get very little time with established characters who ought to be there, with no explanation as to why they aren't around. For example, this conflict takes place in the same setting as the series about Darian Firkin, yet even though he's mentioned in passing several times as clearly being important, he only shows up twice that I remember and his partner Keisha doesn't appear on-page at all. And even with the characters that are there, their actions and interactions are swallowed up by Lackey's latest twists in her magic system that do not make sense and had me skimming pages to find the next bit of actual plot.
The cliffhanger at the end was ridiculous and unnecessary and could just as easily have opened the next book. The continuity errors within the book as well as with previous books made it feel sloppy. A lot of time is spent on telling us how Firesong is dealing with constant pain and discomfort, but not clearly saying whether it's due to the events from the Mage Storms series (and never mentioned in the Darian series), aging (which contradicts established canon of both Hawkbrothers and mages being long-lived if they don't die by conflict), or something new, which could easily be whatever's brewing in this series, in which I'd expect Firesong and his friends to be a lot more worried from the get-go instead of just trying to ease him. Surprises are tossed in at random, such as
Spoiler
apparently Nightwind (Snowfire's mate and Kelvren's tron'dirin) is a trans female and it just never got mentioned before, and did you know the bird-race of tervardi had screams that can kill?I've been getting Lackey's books from the library for decades now, and at this point I think I will wait for reviews before even going that far.