Greg Keyes, The Charnel Prince
Mar. 19th, 2005 05:32 pmThis is the second volume of the Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone sequence, following Briar King. I suspect there's too much going on to wrap up in a mere trilogy. I hope it isn't going to turn into another endlessly dragged-out series with a cast of thousands.
I picked up Briar King used, and was intrigued enough to get this one new in hardcover. Ancient evil is stirring, against a background of messy and bloody mediavaloid politics. This is not the sort of series where the good guys have it all their own way, or even where the good guys are unambiguously good. The action skips about from one group of characters to another, some known from the previous book and some new, as they wander around the landscape or deal with court intrigue, eventually bringing enough of them together for a couple of reasonably satisfying climaxes. It felt very much like a middle book -- I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone to read it without reading Briar King first, and I'm not sure it lives up to the promise of its predecessor. It did keep me absorbed enough one evening to stay on the bus nearly a mile beyond my stop, but that may have been because I was concentrating so hard to puzzle out the language. Bits of it are not exactly English; the characters slip into odd pseudo-old-English or pseudo-Italian dialects. It's usually possible to figure it out from context, but probably not wise to try to do so when ones attention is needed elsewhere.
I picked up Briar King used, and was intrigued enough to get this one new in hardcover. Ancient evil is stirring, against a background of messy and bloody mediavaloid politics. This is not the sort of series where the good guys have it all their own way, or even where the good guys are unambiguously good. The action skips about from one group of characters to another, some known from the previous book and some new, as they wander around the landscape or deal with court intrigue, eventually bringing enough of them together for a couple of reasonably satisfying climaxes. It felt very much like a middle book -- I certainly wouldn't recommend anyone to read it without reading Briar King first, and I'm not sure it lives up to the promise of its predecessor. It did keep me absorbed enough one evening to stay on the bus nearly a mile beyond my stop, but that may have been because I was concentrating so hard to puzzle out the language. Bits of it are not exactly English; the characters slip into odd pseudo-old-English or pseudo-Italian dialects. It's usually possible to figure it out from context, but probably not wise to try to do so when ones attention is needed elsewhere.