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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Flawed ending to a brilliant serries, March 24, 2009
After reading the wonderful Empress and equally good Riven Kingdom, I could not wait to start reading the conclusion to the series. Sadly, I should have left this one in the store and imagined my own conclusion to the trilogy. It's not that the characters aren't interesting, nor the story compelling; it's the interactions of the two that makes this tale sadly lacking. A major portion of the book centers on Rhian trying to become the queen she needs to be. Yet, even though she somewhat does, it doesn't really accomplish anything. There is little in her decisions, or little in any of her angst about being a killing queen, or even in her training that has any real relevancy in what concludes the tale. When I finished the final battle, and set the book down to contemplate it, this became more and more evident. Fine she consolidated her power, did it help her? Not really. She had a hard time with her husband, did it matter? Not really. She distrusted Zandakar, did it matter? Not really. She gathered a fleet, did it matter? No. All of the main lines of conflict and tension ended up being mere window dressing for a final staged set piece battle. Even one of the main fights was nothing more than page filler that while visually compelling, was utterly pointless. The armada that Rhain spent much of the book worrying about gathering? Pointless. The army that she never raised, useless. The skills she learned, moderately useful, but only in her own personal struggle. So why did I read several hundred pages of sometimes angsty conflict? The sad thing is that I am not sure. While we will never be certain, I feel the author had written the ending, needed a page count, and filled until she reached it. The story would have been so much better if the 500 or so odd pages leading up to the end had some relevancy to the finish. In the end, I'm both glad and sad that I read this book. I am glad for seeing her final vision for where this tale was heading. However, I am sad that I should have just read the last 100 pages and been much happier.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Needs more cowbell, March 7, 2010
Thus ends Karen Miller's series about the godspeaker. I really thought a lot of the dialog was tacky and long-winded. I don't mind 800-page books, as long as the content is useful and interesting...and that's where this book fails. I think Karen is a good writer, but an awesome writer like Leiber would minimize the funk and keep to the story. I do like most of the humor, some of it is goofy. And why is Mr Jones suddenly talking like C3P0? This book includes too many POVs as well. I don't know, the whole book was OK, and so was the series. I really liked Empress and still think that Hekat was an awesome villain. I also think that hota-training should be instilled in our school systems so that girls and women can defend themselves from the predators lurking in our society. I like the world Miller created, and the different aspects of each society...but the actual story is just OK.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good story but over-padded in the last volume, September 25, 2011
The first volume of the trilogy, Empress, gave one of the best descriptions of an human yet alien society I've read in a long time. Her Mijak are a tribe heavily dependent on blood sacrifice, perhaps very loosely based on the Maya, who under some very psychotic leaders quickly turn to human sacrifice on an epic scale. The first book describes the rise to power of a young girl taken into slavery, but whose peculiar and totally amoral abilities take her to the top of this disfunctional society. The second volume gives a complete contrast in the rise to power of another girl, but this time on a peaceful society based on an isolated island set in late Medieval Europe, who though a mass of self doubt and indecision, and thwarted by macho characters, eventually manages to get the top job. So you can guess what is going to happen in the third volume. The clash between the two eventually happens, but it is very late in the book. The first two books are well written, and she describes some interesting characters who play a large part, if not the biggest part, in the final clash. However, the conflict happens quickly, in a only a couple of chapters, and I'll leave it to the reader's imagination who wins. The trouble with the third book is the sheer verbage and waffle, 800 odd pages of it, before you get to the final battle. There are some well crafted incidents, but these are isolated in pages and pages of rather boring dialogue between the "European" warrior queen and her characters, full of doubts about her ability and wish to wager war, and her horror of killing. These themes are repeated and repeated again ad nauseum. No sane person likes war and killing, and the author didn't need to spend more than half the book trying to pursuade us and her characters of the undesirability of war. After the first two hundred pages I found myself skimming most of the dialogue, reading the few better bits, and then moving on to the last battle. This part was well written and her publisher perhaps should have made her amplify the battle scenes and cut out most of the dialogue. It would have made a much better book.
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