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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Comfort food in a book, November 7, 2010
For a long time, I bought Feist's books in hardback, because I expected to re-read them. Yet except for the first several, I didn't want to revisit them.
In the middle of this book, I realized why I read Feist despite declining creativity and an increasing reliance on revisionist writing and a need to deliver to readers an escalating danger.
I read Midkemia books to check in on what Pug is up to, along with some supporting characters. Understandably, with time, my other favorite Midkemians have dropped out of the storyline due to age, and new descendants have tried (never entirely successfully) to replace them. This doesn't mean I don't like Jim Dasher, but he'll never replace Jimmy the Hand.
If you want new ideas and fresh concepts, just move on from Raymond Feist.
If you enjoy a good storyteller telling you stories you kinda remember from somewhere, but with characters you like, keep going.
After 20-something books, Feist doesn't deliver freshness. But he can give you a warm, happy, satisfying feeling, without ever reaching the delightful heights he once did.
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46 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
repetitive at best, April 10, 2010
I've read all of Raymen E. Feists' books and up to a certain point enjoyed them immensely.
However, somewhere around Talon of the Silver Hawk his writing started to lose interest, the same concepts were brought in over and over, and the one ever present character in all books, Pug the magician, had reached a stage in which he had been made so powerful by the author that Rayomind just couldn't come up with decent challenges and storylines anymore.
This book is more of the same, repetetive situations and ideas, the author squirming and trying to alter and abandon previously introduced truths and premises just so the new book might somehow end in a climax. A hopeless endeavour as the story is bland, lacks any form of character development, tries to confuse, obfuscate and then reveal a new set of premises in an utter let down ending.
It's devoid of any interesting, exciting chapters to such an extent that it feels like one long conversation between a few main characters.
It's a shame seeing a series you've been following avidly go downhill rapidly, and I will always love the early work Raymond did, but I cannot in good faith recommend this to anyone.
To be honest I can hardly believe Raymond wrote this, so far is it from the wonderfully engaging work he used to come up with.
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27 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
One More Example of Page Inflation, April 12, 2010
This is not Feist's best work. As previous reviews have pointed out, Feist is running out of fresh material for Midkemia. He needs to take a break and look elsewhere, or at least move away from Pug as the main character.
That having been said, I deducted an additional star for making this a trilogy instead of a single book. This has been done by a method that has become increasingly common, and increasingly tiresome - Page Inflation. Let's compare this book to another contemporary book from the same genre: Jim Butcher's "First Lord's Fury".
At first glance, Butcher's book only appears to be about half again as long as this book (480 pages vs. 320). But closer examination of those pages shows that this book's page count has been inflated by using large print and extra blank space on the page. When you start looking at word count, this book is only about half the size of Butcher's book - yet has a suggested retail price of $2.00 more. Frankly I'm getting tired of being ripped off this way.
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