This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday. The verdict: probably not. I might try another work by the author someday, and I think I might have enjoyed this one better in print, but right now I can’t imagine sitting through it again in any format.

Audio Narration and Other Audiobook Notes
The narrator is Andrew Wincott. He was fine, he was pleasant enough to listen to, and he didn’t do anything I found too annoying. I did think he sometimes read the text in a way that gave it a different interpretation than I would have read it, and sometimes I felt like his enunciation could have been more clear. Probably the biggest issue I had was with keeping secondary characters straight, but there were a lot of characters so I definitely don’t blame him for not being able to come up with easily distinguishable voices for all of them.

This audiobook really could have benefitted from a PDF character list like I recently encountered in another audiobook. I probably should have searched the internet for a character list sooner instead of waiting until I wrote my review, but at the beginning of the story I was worried I might encounter spoilers while searching for the list. Then later on I just wasn’t invested enough in the story to care what the real names were and I felt like I was following things well enough. But I hate to spell character names wrong in a review, so I ended up looking some of them up anyway.

I spent the entire book thinking Binabik’s name was “Benedict”. I did think that seemed like an odd name for a troll, but I haven’t known very many trolls, so what do I know? There was another character, Isgrimnur, whose name drove me crazy. For quite a while after his initial introduction, I thought they were referring to him as “his grimoire”. I kept wondering how on earth the guy had earned the odd title of “Grimoire” when he didn’t seem to have any magic-related abilities and didn’t seem to have any words or symbols or anything like that on his person. Even after I realized that couldn’t possibly be what they were saying, I still heard it that way.

Story
This was originally published in 1988, and I think it suffers from its age, at least for a reader with much epic fantasy under her belt. I didn’t feel like there was anything very original here, although there probably was at the time it was published. Epic fantasy is one of my favorite subgenres though, so I don’t necessarily have a problem with books that are chock full of tried-and-true epic fantasy tropes if they’re done in a way that appeals to me. This one wasn’t.

It's hard to give a spoiler-free idea of what the story is about because it takes so long to get going. A large chunk of the beginning is focused on getting to know the main character, Simon. I think he’s supposed to be in his mid teens, but he came across as being a lot younger. To be super vague, an unhappy person in power gets influenced by evil people and does bad things, and Simon gets caught up in events related to that.

My biggest complaint is probably with Simon. He started off as an obnoxious, whiny brat. I felt like the author wanted us to sympathize with this poor boy who didn’t fit into the mold that other people expected him to fill and who just wanted to be left alone to do what he wanted to do, but instead he came across as a self-absorbed child who didn’t care how his actions impacted other people. He did improve as the story progressed, but it took quite a while and I never warmed up to him much. He’s also one of those characters who tends to get lucky (or unlucky) a lot. Things just kind of happen to him. He randomly gets into trouble, and then he randomly gets out of trouble, without there being much direct impact from his own actions.

The author also used some tropes that I don’t care for. Simon is remarkably ignorant about the world he lives in. This allows the author to explain his world to the reader by making other characters explain stuff to Simon. Even these characters seemed annoyed about how much stuff Simon didn’t know. The poor boy also can’t seem to remember much. He has various dreams and visions and even real-life encounters in which he gains info that is useful to the reader and would possibly have been useful to Simon’s companions too, except that he never remembers them until the author is good and ready for him to do so to move the story forward. The things he didn’t remember were all supposed to be fuzzy and terrifying and unreal-seeming, so he legitimately didn’t remember them, but it still felt very manipulative on the part of the author. If I’d enjoyed the story and characters more, neither of these things would have bothered me as much.

In general, I also found the motivations for many of the characters to be vague, which is probably another reason I didn’t get into the story very well. Maybe those motivations will be explained better in subsequent books, but I’m more likely to get invested in characters and their story if I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, regardless of whether I think their actions are good or bad or logical or illogical.

I liked Binabik the most, and the story picked up for me after Simon met him. I didn’t dislike the beginning, but Simon was so annoying at that point that he dragged things down for me. It was more interesting in the middle parts, but I started to lose my investment by the end when everything was just a mess and we were focusing more on secondary characters whose identities I couldn’t keep straight. That part would have been less problematic for me in print. The end of this book, not surprisingly, left everything pretty much up in the air so it’s not a very satisfying place to end the story, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to want to read further.

I’m rating this at 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 on Goodreads. ( )

I was disappointed by this book. There were huge chunks of fairly boring filler that had no real bearing on the story itself. The book itself was in need of a good editing. I am a fan of Tad Williams but this fell short. ( )

Well, that was better than expected...
( )

I read this back in college about the time it was released. And I remember at the time it being a tough read, slow in the middle, and while satisfying it didn't make me want to jump into the rest of the series.

Well fast forward 30 years or so and I decided I wanted to give it another go. And I'm starting to wonder if I'm misremembering it completely. This was not a tough read, I flew through it and I can't wait to start book 2. Maybe I just had to mature from my college age self who was working a job, going to college classes and dating my future wife. But man I'm glad I jumped in again. ( )

Summary: This is a solid fantasy book with all the usual suspects doing all the usual things. I really liked the central character Simon and found some of the sequences gripping.

Standout feature: Sequence when Simon found the prince locked up and effected a midnight rescue plan, dripped with style and emotion. I was on the edge of my seat and wanted more of that sort of writing.


Things I liked:

The central character of Simon: I think the author has written this character smartly. Not just an adult in a small body who's killing time till he becomes the next ultimate warrior/arch mage. In particular I enjoyed times when as a child he is challenged to review the ethics of some of the decisions he's made. All I can say is the character sounded 'true' to me, which helped a lot in wanting to keep reading about his life.

Auxiliary characters: Not the main plot drives but the court bard and jester I both enjoyed a lot. They were more than just plot devices used to deliver key bits of information. They added color and context to some of the crucial parts of the story and enhanced my enjoyment and consideration of what was going on.

Things I thought could have been improved.

Too many POVs/characters: Especially at the start of the book their are a lot of characters introduced by name without a lot of time being spent on developing the identity of the character or what function they performed in the story. A bit like getting introduced to a whole bunch of people at a party I was a bit a loss to remember everybody's names. I think if this had been a bit more restricted (just 2 or three, or even sticking to a first person narrative) I would have been able to follow along more easily.

The end this is a big book and I felt it was a bit cheeky to end the first book with almost no proper resolution. I'm going to read the second book now. A large part of that is because I don't feel satisfied having read the first. I think it's nice (at least for a first book in the series), if you can read it as a bit of a stand alone. To leave almost all the characters in jeopardy is pretty rough having slogged through 700 pages to get there.



( )