Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Liked it that much, did you?
I'll probably give it another chapter or two, but then I am stubborn.
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TBH, I don't think it's actually
bad as far as their respective bodies of work go (mind you, that's for values of badness including the absolutely dire quality of the most recent Valdemar installments, which skews the curve somewhat), and the actual plotline is reasonably okay and it made for a reasonably cromulent though aggressively mediocre YA post-Potter fantasy schoolkids saving the world tale.
But I thought the interesting ideas were executed poorly, and the boring bits were given unnecessary prominence, the prose suffered from both the authors' respective writing tics, and both Lackey and Edghill have considerably better works one could be reading instead, if one hasn't read them all already.
(For Edghill, I recommend her flawed-but-fun-and-incomplete The Twelve Treasures series featuring a crossover between our modern world and a fairly dysfunctional classic high fantasy one, her Bast cozy mysteries featuring a Wiccan witch, and/or her alternate-history fantasy set during the reign of Charles II, I think it was, co-written with Andre Norton. ETA: I think they're all out of print, though, although the library still has some of them in paper.
ETA 2: With that in mind, a
Bast short story as an online-read freebie over at the author's blog, if anyone's interested.)