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Review - The Shadowleague
Apr. 14th, 2008 04:05 amJust finished reading the Shadowleague trilogy, by Maggie Furey: The Eye of Myrial, Spirit of the Stone, and The Eye of Eternity.
The first book took a long time to get started. I was afraid it was going to be a horribly tedious job, reading through all that, and was considering adhering to my you have one chapter to capture me rule. But in the end, I decided to read on and I'm glad I did.
There's a lot of detail in this trilogy. Believe me -- even the donkey who appears about three times in the whole thing gets a good paragraph of description. It stopped bothering me after about half of the first book, though -- I think it was a little of both me getting into the swing of it, and the introductory parts being over with.
There are also a lot of characters. I was very confused at first, particularly with trying to keep up with the characters all meeting and parting and coming together again in new formations. However, characters are a strength of this trilogy. There are no pure, unadulterated good guys or bad guys. There are basically good guys who make bad decisions, or guys who are being bad temporarily but will be good, or people who just aren't suited to what they're supposed to be doing. All the characters have their good points and their flaws, and they all have reasons for doing whatever they do.
Unfortunately, relationships aren't such a strong point. There's a lot of love at first sight, or typical fatherly devotion, and the gawky young lad inevitably grows up well and gets the girl. A girl realising a guy is her father immediately throws aside the fact that he's a rebel, left her mother, did bad things, and so on, and immediately embraces him as her father to an extent that doesn't feel realistic.
Plotwise, it was reasonable, but felt kind of awkward to me. There was no one true bad guy, the defeat of which would save the day. In the end, the problem was essentially a failing computer system. The climax of the book felt a bit odd to me because first they dealt with a minor bad guy and saved a kid, and then they just got to fixing a computer system. I suppose it partly feels odd to me because lately I've been immersed in fantasy where there is an ultimate bad guy. Without that kind of focus, though, it felt quite slow-paced and in the amount of writing it took Frodo to get to Mordor, the story had barely moved past Rivendell. If the rest of the book had been faster paced, the relationships might not have felt so odd.
It also felt odd to have a very happy ever after kind of ending. There were all kinds of calamities and deaths throughout the trilogy, but the last ten pages seem to return everything to what it was before -- not painstakingly fixed, but brought back by the metaphorical tapping of a few keys.
I'm not sure I recommend this trilogy as highly as other books I've been reading lately, but it was definitely an enjoyable read and something to seek one's teeth into. There's a lot of world building and interesting things happening with characters.
The first book took a long time to get started. I was afraid it was going to be a horribly tedious job, reading through all that, and was considering adhering to my you have one chapter to capture me rule. But in the end, I decided to read on and I'm glad I did.
There's a lot of detail in this trilogy. Believe me -- even the donkey who appears about three times in the whole thing gets a good paragraph of description. It stopped bothering me after about half of the first book, though -- I think it was a little of both me getting into the swing of it, and the introductory parts being over with.
There are also a lot of characters. I was very confused at first, particularly with trying to keep up with the characters all meeting and parting and coming together again in new formations. However, characters are a strength of this trilogy. There are no pure, unadulterated good guys or bad guys. There are basically good guys who make bad decisions, or guys who are being bad temporarily but will be good, or people who just aren't suited to what they're supposed to be doing. All the characters have their good points and their flaws, and they all have reasons for doing whatever they do.
Unfortunately, relationships aren't such a strong point. There's a lot of love at first sight, or typical fatherly devotion, and the gawky young lad inevitably grows up well and gets the girl. A girl realising a guy is her father immediately throws aside the fact that he's a rebel, left her mother, did bad things, and so on, and immediately embraces him as her father to an extent that doesn't feel realistic.
Plotwise, it was reasonable, but felt kind of awkward to me. There was no one true bad guy, the defeat of which would save the day. In the end, the problem was essentially a failing computer system. The climax of the book felt a bit odd to me because first they dealt with a minor bad guy and saved a kid, and then they just got to fixing a computer system. I suppose it partly feels odd to me because lately I've been immersed in fantasy where there is an ultimate bad guy. Without that kind of focus, though, it felt quite slow-paced and in the amount of writing it took Frodo to get to Mordor, the story had barely moved past Rivendell. If the rest of the book had been faster paced, the relationships might not have felt so odd.
It also felt odd to have a very happy ever after kind of ending. There were all kinds of calamities and deaths throughout the trilogy, but the last ten pages seem to return everything to what it was before -- not painstakingly fixed, but brought back by the metaphorical tapping of a few keys.
I'm not sure I recommend this trilogy as highly as other books I've been reading lately, but it was definitely an enjoyable read and something to seek one's teeth into. There's a lot of world building and interesting things happening with characters.
