4 posts tagged “morgan howell”
hmm.
well this book just went and took what i found annoying in the last book and magnified it. males are apparently completely submissive, which is, again, annoying. females are apparently all bitchy and sneaky and manipulative. kovok-mah's infatuated with her, but that doesn't mean anything when his MOTHER doesn't want him to see her. a society of mama's boys? oh yeah. so you know, i guess that's how much she means to him, in the end.
dar is still whiny. and oblivious. and helpless. this book portrays the males as a submissive species almost to make her look semi-able, but i feel that that wasn't accomplished. i felt extremely sorry for sevren, because he most definitely sacrifices almost everything for her, and gets nowhere. kovok-mah, on the other hand, is bound indefinitely to his mother's word, no matter what that is. it makes absolutely no sense to me.
the ending leaves you confused too. but i guess that was the intention of the ambiguous nature, which also annoyed me. what's the point of building this all up just to be like nope, she's not queen and hey, who knows if they get together? the bad guy still lives. what's the point of her vision telling her who her enemy is, and then she doesn't defeat it in the end? again, i don't get it. i can either assume by her children calling her muthuri that she either got with sevren and stuck to her orc lingo, or she finally managed to get with kovok-mah, somehow. but then why the dramatic exit from kovok-mah? makes no sense.
it tries to build an epic end by the time the battles meet, i know. i just don't know if i felt very excited about it. actually wait, yeah, no; i wasn't very excited by the "epic"-ness. i'm going to have to say this one was a pass for me :\ unfortunately. i really wanted dar to redeem herself somehow, but most of this and the last book was spent on developing orc culture rather than developing character. i wanted dar to grow as a character, but instead she sort of went backwards, from an admirable heroine to a pathetic one. she still pines for kovok-mah nonstop in this. annoying. i personally think there's a way to pine without being so teenage girl about it. once kovok-mah enters her thoughts she seemingly thinks in all exclamation marks, and forgets all else. we ARE reading about an adult, right?
then again, i remember that this character apparently had daddy issues. which we never had kovok-mah confront her about, if i remember correctly. so their "loving" relationship ultimately just isn't very convincing at all to me.
sigh.
this one was okay, compared to the first book. her character changes so abruptly from one second to the next that it annoyed me to no end. she was always indecisive, and she whines nonstop to kovok-mah. i'm not sure how he was ever portrayed as being attractive, since that wasn't how he was written in the first book. i never saw that transition, is all i'm saying. it was random and incompletely built.
she makes a 360 herself that annoyed me, because whereas she was strong and firm in the first book, and knew what she wanted... in this book she was constantly manipulated and never in control of her situation. not to mention ALWAYS pining after kovok-mah, which was annoying almost to the point of being funny. wth happened to her character? she went from assertive, self-assured, and confidant to a complete loser within a couple of chapters. hated it.
the finale was decent though, but again, happened very quickly where one second they're all having tea or whatever and the next i'm left stranded and a little bit lost. treaty? okay, works out. the buildup wasn't very good, i feel, but the conclusion wasn't bad for what little amount of build-up.
next.
decided to try my luck with his other works, and was pleasantly surprised despite preset expectations. the heroine is strong, witty, and tough, which is just the way i like them. i wasn't sure whether there was any romantic involvement either way though, but that's fine with me, since i'm more pleased usually by the hint of romance rather than actual romance. what can i say? i like being teased.
anyway, the encampments presented in this story, of cavalry and war, is very realistic to me. i'm not even sure why, because obviously i've never been involved in a war. it's just that there is a certain kind of darkness to the way it's portrayed, and it's not a straight-shot chess board game like it usually is in literature. i liked the amount of detail devoted to it, i guess, because i wasn't expecting it at all.
anyway, i keep trying to find characters in here that will recur in the shadows of the path trilogy he's now writing, and at first i thought it was going to be othur, but evidently not. we'll just have to see, i guess.
by the end of this i was looking forward to the next volume. here we go.
well, what is there to say? i really wasn't expecting it to be good, and that it exceeded my initial expectation isn't surprising then. but it was pretty refreshing to read something good again, and actually, i liked it rather so well i don't know if there is much to type about it.
the characters don't particularly stand out, but they certainly make a nice contrast to each other. the world-building was what interested me; the name yim initially turned me off, because it sounds like "salt" in chinese and it's close to "yam" in english. the names in this world are vaguely latin, and the magic system isn't anything new really.. so what is it about this that was so refreshing? that's what i can't get figured out :T
maybe i was just in the right mood for this type of fantasy, but i sincerely believe there was something really exceptional about this book. i just can't pinpoint what. the relationship between yim and honus is realistic, but then again, yim acts somewhat out of character near the end of the book; i guess it could be just the author trying to tie things up as neatly as possible. all in all, this book acts only as a good setup for a continuing storyline, but nonetheless it does so in a way that keeps me excited about what's to come. the scenes of yim using her powers are somewhat few and far between, but when they come the author makes her seem quite genuinely powerful, and so despite the lack of action it went for good badass...ness. that said, it wasn't entirely without action, and honus seems badass in his own right. i was only confused about HOW exactly he'd fallen in love with yim? that was the single thing that felt rather abrupt and underdeveloped, because so much of it was devoted to world-building.
now it makes me want to go and read morgan howell's orc queen series. it does sound like it would be quite good, but maybe i read them out of sequence? from what i read on the author's site, this series takes place two hundred years after the orc queen series.. but i'll end up reading them anyway, so i'll try to dig those out of the pile and check them out.
