9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Everything Except the Kitchen Sink, April 15, 2004
This review is from: Daughter of Exile (Hardcover)
Somehow Isabel Glass manages to shoehorn in nearly every element of fantasy going and yet somehow manages to keep it from overwhelming her story. She's got your standard medieval setting, a king in peril, a kingdom invaded, elves, enchanted forests, schools of magic, giants, shapeshifting, torture, plotting heirs, deformities, drug addiction, snotty nobles, adolescent rebellion AND a spunky heroine.
What allows this book to suceed is that Glass keeps the book straightforward, in both plot, tone and page count. Rather than wax poetic on the strange magic-wielding/shape-shifting women of the forest for four chapters, they are introduced, help our main protagonists and come back to give a twist to the story towards the end. Interactions among characters are similarly blunt. There isn't of romantic prose on offer, but there also isn't a lot of overheated melodrama either.
Those looking for something new to sate their jaded fantasy palate should probably look elsewhere, although I found it a reasonably enjoyable and quick read. At least you won't feel cheated of hours of you life at the end. Newer readers getting into the genre and teens will likely find this an engaging read. Overall Glass shows she can put a story together. If she can narrow her focus and develop an original concept or a twist on something old, she could definately go places.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
NOT a first book, nor a good one either., November 6, 2009
This book was so lame, I wanted to shoot it, to put it out of my misery. I barely got through it, and only managed to do so by using it as a 'filler book' -- you know, the kind of novel you keep hanging around the place to fill in those short, useless, empty spaces of time in your day, like commercial breaks and toilet stops and waiting for the phone to ring. A filler book needs to be uninteresting enough that you can easily put it down and go back to doing more important things whenever you need to. And this book definitely fit the bill.
The story is poorly written. Characters are dull and unlikeable, their motivations questionable, illogical or non-existant. Logic gaps are huge. Plots and settings are total cliches. There is barely any true drama or uncertainty or suspense; no one ever truly seems to be in danger. Outcomes are predictable. The way the book is written is choppy, with no flow to it; it grinds like the gears of a faulty machine, annoyingly, without synchronicity, like it's going to break down at any minute. And it frequently does stall. Just when you think something is about to happen, it doesn't. Furthermore, there is practically no sense of urgency to the storyline. Nor do the characters seem concerned about what happens to them, or why. When Angarrad is almost assassinated, twice, she almost doesn't seem to care. She just plods along almost thoughtlessly, much like the plot; she doesn't look over her shoulder or take precautions, and she forgets for most of the time that she is in any peril whatsoever. I lost count of the number of times when something happened in the plot that seemed urgent, and I thought, finally we'll get some action...and then, for some reason, the plot stalled, usually with the author saying 'a few weeks went by' -- which happened a LOT. This book dragged on for MONTHS, years even. It didn't make sense, if the author was trying to build tension and keep the reader hooked, to do that. Even when war finally breaks out in the book, it takes ages to get through it. The city comes under attack, yet for some reason, month after month, even with the use of catapults and someone opening a gate from inside, the invaders don't get in or wreak any damage or even attempt to climb the wall. I mean, what the...? And when the invaders do finally get in, the war is weird. It's slow and illogical, and people have time to wander about and do their usual things in the middle of it. Soldiers set up camps in the middle of it and all go to sleep for a good night's rest; guests check into inns, which are totally undamaged, and have uninterrupted meetings and nights of sleep in the middle of the war zone. It just made no sense, and had none of the sense of urgency or fear one might expect to find on a battlefield. Even before that, if characters escaped from dungeons or the law, there was no real requirement for them to make an effort to run or hide; they'd just hang about at a friend's house for a few months, doing nothing, and that was enough to escape the not-so-long arm of the law. At various other times in the book, important characters go AWOL for months at a time, and even when they finally do get a mention again, they don't actually do much or explain where they've been; nor do they ask the questions a normal person might deem important, or do anything else sensible or appropriate. The whole cast seemed like they were on Prozac. As did the storyline, sadly. Instead of action or intelligent dialogue or motivated characters or intrigue, what we get instead is lots of descriptions of all the clothes and jewels and finery and scenery and other useless and tedious background information, till the reader, or this one at least, just wants to scream, enough! Give me a novel, not a catalogue! And while you're at it, give me a cliffhanger where the character doesn't just sit still on the cliff for five months, twiddling their thumbs and not even bothering to ask what they're doing there! Less filler, more thriller, pur-lease!
The characters and their dialogue, and even their emotions, were so awkward and poorly written and disconnected from reality, I couldn't help wondering about the author of this book. I mean no disrespect, but this book gave the impression that its author just didn't have an understanding of how people normally behave or interact with one another. It was extremely odd. Then again, maybe the author is perfectly in tune with humanity's ways, but just didn't have the time or skill or experience to commit them to paper in an appropriate way on this occasion. I don't know.
To give credit where credit is due, I will admit that the author did have a few intriguing ideas. However, they were few and far between, and never came to fruition as they should, and in the end, I think this frustrated me more, because I could see talent and thoughtfulness going to waste, drowned in a sea of banality.
The book's vast list of failings would have been easier to forgive had this really been the author's first novel, as the book's cover claimed it to be. But it wasn't a first novel; the author has written other books, under a different pen name. I get the feeling that maybe the publisher labelled it a first novel so that people would be more forgiving of it, and also so that, if people didn't like it, it wouldn't tarnish the sales of the author's other books. But of course, I'm just guessing at that. Maybe the publisher thought it was great, and merely changed the author's name to give her a new start in a new genre. Given their uber-poor editing of the book, maybe they just didn't know better. I mean, the grammar is poor; for instance, there were so many commas missing from where they should have been, the book literally became laughable, comical. Leaving out a comma can change the whole meaning of a sentence. For example, if you wrote, 'They went out riding, Angarrad with them', it would have vastly different meaning to 'They went out riding Angarrad with them'. See what I mean? I question some of the wording used in the book, too, for instance in this quote: 'they bore the marks of unnumbered students'. Unless there was some reason the students should have had numbers on them, I believe that sentence would have been better written as 'they bore the marks of innumerable students'. Another example is (and I quote again): 'She cursed herself for using such an ambiguous phase'. Clearly, 'phase' should have been 'phrase. And so on it went.
Still, perhaps this book will leave a valuable legacy; this book may well serve as an inspiration to REAL first time authors, in that they may well look at this book and say to themselves, "I could definitely write a better novel than that...so why don't I?"
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyable, March 13, 2005
At first when I started reading this book, I wasn't very impressed. The main character, Angarred, seemed flighty, the plot moved along haphazardly, and the other characters seemed bland or one-sided. I don't give up easily though, and my consternation turned to pleasure as the story progressed.
For fans of court intrigue, romantic fantasy, and magic, this book should hold your interest. It's not the best by any means, but it is a good read. I found it slightly refreshing- Glass' writing style is completely different than any other fantasy writers that I have read. For those who liked Canavan's Magician's Guild series, you might want to check this out.
I would consider this book a light read, not nearly as involved as others out there, but good nonetheless. I'll definetly be picking up the next book in the series when it is released in paperback (and for those of you who don't like to start a series before its all published, don't worry, this book ends with a lot of loose ends tied, so you should be able to hold out for the next one in patience). I found "Daughter of Exile" a worthy read.
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