Red King, Blue Queen
Feb. 25th, 2007 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraIt will come as no surprise that I have now (via bookfinder.com) bought five more of Dunnett's Dolly books. I'm a hundred pages through Dolly and the Cookie Bird/Ibiza Surprise/Murder in the Round and have managed to put it down somewhere in my room, from whence I cannot now extract it, so I'm reading Liz Williams instead. Anyway.
I posted about The Ordinary before – this is the book that that was a sequel to. It has, as I said, minor cult status and is therefore pricier than your average secondhand book, but fortunately I found it in the same library that I got The Ordinary from.
This one grew on me. The basic plot is very familiar – a young boy joins a displaced King and his rebels in response to a dream, and is given instruction in magic to prepare him for the arrival of a mysterious, powerful magician who will restore balance to the world – but it’s treated with such seriousness that the characters become icons rather than stereotypes. It’s always hard to pull off a story that involves almost unbelievably powerful magic-users, but this does it well, with clear limits and a build-up of tension (so slow as to be almost imperceptible) to the final battle between Jessex/Yron and the evil magician Drudaen. A battle which is lost, to great cost and the irrevocable alteration of the world; there is a final reckoning, though, but it comes many, many years later...
It’s a well-rounded world and a well-told story, although unfortunately either Grimsley or the Meisha Merlin copyeditor is completely incapable of using the correct form of the verb “to lie”. In contrast, the blurb, unusually, summarises the first thirty-eight pages and stops. I do prefer this to ones that give away the first four-fifths of the book (thinking of Dunnett’s The Disorderly Knights) or get the main character’s name wrong (my copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap). The romance between the two leads (which seems to have gotten a lot of reviewers on Amazon stirred up) is sweet and low-key, and the agonising over Jessex being a few months underage (by reviewers and Kirith Kirin himself) does seem a little overwrought considering Jessex is spending ages everyday in an altered time state learning magic with the sisters.
I posted about The Ordinary before – this is the book that that was a sequel to. It has, as I said, minor cult status and is therefore pricier than your average secondhand book, but fortunately I found it in the same library that I got The Ordinary from.
This one grew on me. The basic plot is very familiar – a young boy joins a displaced King and his rebels in response to a dream, and is given instruction in magic to prepare him for the arrival of a mysterious, powerful magician who will restore balance to the world – but it’s treated with such seriousness that the characters become icons rather than stereotypes. It’s always hard to pull off a story that involves almost unbelievably powerful magic-users, but this does it well, with clear limits and a build-up of tension (so slow as to be almost imperceptible) to the final battle between Jessex/Yron and the evil magician Drudaen. A battle which is lost, to great cost and the irrevocable alteration of the world; there is a final reckoning, though, but it comes many, many years later...
It’s a well-rounded world and a well-told story, although unfortunately either Grimsley or the Meisha Merlin copyeditor is completely incapable of using the correct form of the verb “to lie”. In contrast, the blurb, unusually, summarises the first thirty-eight pages and stops. I do prefer this to ones that give away the first four-fifths of the book (thinking of Dunnett’s The Disorderly Knights) or get the main character’s name wrong (my copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap). The romance between the two leads (which seems to have gotten a lot of reviewers on Amazon stirred up) is sweet and low-key, and the agonising over Jessex being a few months underage (by reviewers and Kirith Kirin himself) does seem a little overwrought considering Jessex is spending ages everyday in an altered time state learning magic with the sisters.
