Quote:
Originally Posted by Stitchawl
There is good reason that it's out of print. It was HORRIBLE! It was as bad as the rest of the series was good. Absolutely boring!
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Thanks for the warning, but now I'm kind of morbidly curious.
If my dad's old paperback of
Whirlwind turns up, I'll give it a try, but otherwise it doesn't sound like it'd be worth spending money on even if it shows up in a discounted e-version.
(My personal not!recommendation for least favourite Asian Saga book that should only be read from the library or on dirt-cheap deep-discount sale would have to be for
Gai-Jin, which I really, really wanted to like, but just didn't click for me and turned out to be dismayingly turgid and boring, although it had a bunch of otherwise interesting elements and backstory-filling-crossover-events that by all rights I should have loved when put together.)
Anyway, finished a bunch of other (non-childhood) nostalgia books by catching up with
Lawrence Watt-Evans's Ethshar fantasy series, which I first encountered by purchasing the lot via Fictionwise coupon sale, but kind of lost track of since FW went defunct.
Wildside Press had a coupon sale in March which I took advantage of to get some discounted DRM-free copies of the more recently-released ones I'd been missing, and accordingly I eventually binge-read the lot.
The Unwelcome Warlock, #11 in the series, was where I left off last time, at that time being published as a reader-supported serial released in "as-soon-as-the-next-gets-funded" pre-Kickstarter model LWE was using at the time. It's kind of a triple sequel to 3 previous stories in the series, following up on what happened to the warlocks in general, one warlock in particular, and an empire relating to warlocks thereof, and while the story as I recalled it was interesting, I never did end up following it to the finish.
Anyway, this was an interesting wrapping up of a bunch of thematic threads and "what-happened-to-this-character/situation" from previous novels, even though I think I'd have liked some more exploration of one particular change-of-status-quo item (which I guess was in a way covered by one of the previous novels, and thus the author didn't feel like going over that ground again, even if the present setup could have made for a considerably more complicated and nuanced take on things than IIRC happened last time).
But otherwise it worked out satisfyingly enough, I suppose, and one of the late-story revelations was fairly intriguing and hopefully kicks off some more stories exploring that.
Sorcerer's Widow &
Relics of War, #12 & #13 were next. Although the stories in these were somewhat different in tone and setting, thematically they seemed a bit the same, since they were kind of about young people learning lessons about the real world and such (one involving a pair of youths trying to swindle the titular widow out of some magical artifacts, the other with the children of a post-war family befriending an enemy soldier as a "pet") and employing trickery (or having it used upon them) to get to what seems to be the best possible outcome, even if it's not necessarily what they really wanted at the outset.
IIRC I read somewhere on LWE's site or blog that he'd been trying to retool the Ethshar series as more YA-oriented in the hopes of getting more market appeal for his titles, and IMHO it kind of shows in the writing of these, which is perfectly cromulent but seems rather simplified after the greater political and personal complexity of TUW.
That said, these were written fairly entertainingly and provided a nifty look at some more of the worldbuilding backstory underpinning Ethshar (its greatest strength, IMHO), by showing what happens to magical artifacts and the magically-affected after their creators are gone, and how otherwise ordinary people get along with such.
Tales of Ethshar was the short-story collection of the lot, a few of which I'd previously read in anthologies or as online freebie reads on his website. IMHO, LWE's work is better at longer lengths, at least in this setting, but some of the stories were neat little slices of encapsulated Ethsharicity, and a few stood out as especially good, such as "Sirinita's Dragon", which goes in an unexpected but harrowingly logical direction.
Finally,
Ithnalin's Restoration, #8, was a re-read, my having gotten it out of the library in hardcover after having devoured the rest of the Ethshar series, and now finally available as an e-book after a few years in rights limbo.
A nifty self-contained wizard's apprentice coming-of-age tale when said apprentice has to deal with fixing a spell gone wrong while pretty much all the high-level experts who could help her are occupied with magical/political crisis going on in book #6, and thus has to resort to "mundane" help, as well as her own resources.
In retrospect, this gives me a bit of a "The Greatest Story Never Told" feeling like that Booster Gold spotlight episode from
Justice League Unlimited where the real story is the relatively domestic mishaps the "ordinary" people have to deal with while the big city-crushing mega-event battle is going on, and I think I like it more now than I did back on the initial read.
Overall, these were a nice dip back into the world of an engaging and entertaining but not particularly complicated often-humorous light fantasy series which does sometimes explore the human condition with a certain amount of depth, and entertains the notion of compromise on one's ideals and ambitions, but never gets really heavy or dark, and maintains a firm sense of optimism even in the face of existential absurdity.
Medium-firm recommend for good, clean, wholesome, enjoyable traditional-ish high-fantasy fun where everything mostly works out okay in the end, if that's what you're in the mood for. (The novels are written standalone so you get a complete adventure in one book that you don't really need to have read the others for, although a few of them do refer back to or feature characters that were established from previous stories. But the actual storylines are written from times and places all over the Ethsharite map and history and there's only a vague semblance of sequence/interconnectedness to a handful of them, so you can usually pick up any given title and read it as an independent tale.)