Reading ...

Finished The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley P. Beaulieu. It's an interesting world, but I just couldn't get into the characters. I would have liked a bit more description - several times I had to jarringly re-image some part of the world when a new (major) detail was dropped in the middle of an action sequence. Terms like vanahezhan, suurahezhan, dhoshahezhan, and jalahezhan are introduced cold, and the reader is left to understand what they are from thin wisps of context - those are all elemental creatures - but they're not used *enough* to really stick in the mind, and they all visually scan too similarly, leaving a muddle.

Two stars, and I'll pass on the sequels.

Reading ...

Finished The Winds of Khalakovo by Bradley P. Beaulieu. It's an interesting world, but I just couldn't get into the characters. I would have liked a bit more description - several times I had to jarringly re-image some part of the world when a new (major) detail was dropped in the middle of an action sequence. Terms like vanahezhan, suurahezhan, dhoshahezhan, and jalahezhan are introduced cold, and the reader is left to understand what they are from thin wisps of context - those are all elemental creatures - but they're not used *enough* to really stick in the mind, and they all visually scan too similarly, leaving a muddle.

Two stars, and I'll pass on the sequels.

More Reading ...

This was some weeks ago, but I did re-read The Name of the Wind, followed by the sequel, The Wise Man's Fear, both by Patrick Rothfuss.

I didn't care for Wind the first time around; this time, knowing that nothing really gets resolved in the book, I actually felt it wasn't *too* bad. The main character's actions are still far too unbelievable for his age, but it's readable. Then I jumped into Fear.

Ouch.

About a quarter of the way into the book, a major plot event that was set up in the first book, that was alluded to in both the first and second books as being of huge importance, is passed over with a there are (in-world) public records available if you want to know what happened, so it would be a waste of our time to recount it here. Then, a chapter later, after starting a passage by ship, the main character mentions in passing that all his fellow travelers were killed by pirates, he barely survived through superhuman efforts and lost all his belongings, including an item of sentimental value that we've spent several pages implying the importance of said item and a magical item that we spend even more pages detailing how complex the forging of the item by the main character was and how vitally important it is to the character ... all with a dismissive paragraph that reminded me of how the old serials would end with an impossible cliffhanger one week that would be explained away at the start of the next episode.

Or, rather, that the author had written himself into a corner that he was too lazy to actually find his way out of. I was good and didn't throw the book across the room. Once might have been a (badly timed) homage to the old pulps, but two so close together destroys any hope the the author will actually deliver a coherent story.

Nothing much happens for the rest of Fear. Oh, portents are flying thick, the past is chewed over and the apocalypse approaches, but at this rate we"ll be in volume eight or nine before we actually touch on the *what* and the *why* of the certain doom that looms in the present, much less actually confront it.