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I've been meaning to read this series for a LONG time. I have all of the books, in hardcover, I just never got around to picking this first one up and starting it. (I have far, far too many books owned that I have not yet read. Someone should smack me.) In any case, I finally decided to dive right in.
The premise of the book is that a small sheep-herding community on the edge of one of the Isles that make up this world gets disrupted when first a strange woman appears on some flotsam, followed by the arrival of a trireme of soldiers and nobles in search of a long lost heir, and then a lord arrives ostensibly looking for sheep to wrangle back to his homeland. These three occurrences completely disrupt the small community and end up dragging some of its members--Garric and Sharina, Cashel and Ilna--away from their sheltered lives, where they get caught up in the politics, magic, and intrigues of the rest of the Isles, including the personal struggles of the long-dead King Carus and The Hooded One.
This has some of the basic tropes of an epic fantasy novel in it--long lost heir found in a farming village, young men and women heading off into the world and high adventure, etc. I'm a huge fantasy fan, been reading it forever, so this didn't bother me at all. What makes a fantasy novel is the world and the characters. Either the world is intriguing and you want to explore it just as much as the main characters do, or the characters catch you up and drag you along with them because you want to find out what happens to them.
This book succeeded on both levels . . . but only to a point. I was really interested in how the author would use the fact that the world was basically simply a ring of scattered islands. Obviously there would have to be more of a focus on ships as transportation, etc. And you could have a bunch of different cultures for each island. But we only really ended up visiting two of the main islands, and seeing really only three societies (two of which were incredibly similar). So there was some disappointment there. However, we did get to see some interesting aspects of the world that were intriguing, such as the island that had inexplicably risen with the insectoid race and the culture that lived exclusively on boats surrounding an iceberg. So on the world level, the two extremes evened out.
The same more or less happened with the characters. I liked a few of them and was interested in what would happen to them--Garric and Cashel in particular--but I didn't become attached to Sharina at all, which was a significant plot thread, and Ilna only became interesting after her disastrous attempt to follow Garric. So I wasn't as attached to the characters as I should have been. Because of this, I wasn't as caught up in the danger and intrigue of the plot. I found I wasn't interested in any of the secondary characters at all, and I should have been.
So my final rating for this is really 2.5 stars. I wished I'd gotten more caught up in the characters and their plight, but it just didn't happen. There were some interesting elements, and I'd hope that the next few novels explored the world in more depth, but I'm not rushing to read the second book at this point.
The premise of the book is that a small sheep-herding community on the edge of one of the Isles that make up this world gets disrupted when first a strange woman appears on some flotsam, followed by the arrival of a trireme of soldiers and nobles in search of a long lost heir, and then a lord arrives ostensibly looking for sheep to wrangle back to his homeland. These three occurrences completely disrupt the small community and end up dragging some of its members--Garric and Sharina, Cashel and Ilna--away from their sheltered lives, where they get caught up in the politics, magic, and intrigues of the rest of the Isles, including the personal struggles of the long-dead King Carus and The Hooded One.
This has some of the basic tropes of an epic fantasy novel in it--long lost heir found in a farming village, young men and women heading off into the world and high adventure, etc. I'm a huge fantasy fan, been reading it forever, so this didn't bother me at all. What makes a fantasy novel is the world and the characters. Either the world is intriguing and you want to explore it just as much as the main characters do, or the characters catch you up and drag you along with them because you want to find out what happens to them.
This book succeeded on both levels . . . but only to a point. I was really interested in how the author would use the fact that the world was basically simply a ring of scattered islands. Obviously there would have to be more of a focus on ships as transportation, etc. And you could have a bunch of different cultures for each island. But we only really ended up visiting two of the main islands, and seeing really only three societies (two of which were incredibly similar). So there was some disappointment there. However, we did get to see some interesting aspects of the world that were intriguing, such as the island that had inexplicably risen with the insectoid race and the culture that lived exclusively on boats surrounding an iceberg. So on the world level, the two extremes evened out.
The same more or less happened with the characters. I liked a few of them and was interested in what would happen to them--Garric and Cashel in particular--but I didn't become attached to Sharina at all, which was a significant plot thread, and Ilna only became interesting after her disastrous attempt to follow Garric. So I wasn't as attached to the characters as I should have been. Because of this, I wasn't as caught up in the danger and intrigue of the plot. I found I wasn't interested in any of the secondary characters at all, and I should have been.
So my final rating for this is really 2.5 stars. I wished I'd gotten more caught up in the characters and their plight, but it just didn't happen. There were some interesting elements, and I'd hope that the next few novels explored the world in more depth, but I'm not rushing to read the second book at this point.
