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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A nice beginning..., April 6, 2006
This review is from: Kindling (Hardcover)
...to what seems to be another multi-part series. Now usually, I avoid series like the plague until they're finished (who wants to wait four years between books?), but this one snared my interest.
Now, while I agree with the reviewer below and his critique of Harriet Klausner (speed-reading is not a virtue, my dear), Kindling is by no means an awful book. In fact, it's quite good.
The plot (at least in this first book) is fairly standard: brave young heroes must Band Together To Fight Evil. But what makes this book sing is the setting and the character development.
The descriptions of this alternate fantasy Earth, where evil sorcery rests uneasily side-by-side with early 20th-century technology, are outstanding. Farren's imagery is great, and his prose is lyrical. Sure, Kindling is by no means 'realistic' alternate history, but I don't believe that was Farren's intention in the first place, as should be evident by his sly references to 'that family of moonshiners and horse theives, the Bush family'. It is first and foremost a fun story.
The characters are very accessible and well-realized, I thought. We are not hit over the head with endless pages of needless backstory; instead, Farren jumps right into the story, only working in backstory where appropriate. Instead, he dwells more on how the characters are reacting to current events. Their motivations and actions are clear and understandable; their thoughts and hopes are realistic and elicit sympathy.
I knocked half a star off my review simply because I now have to wait some indeterminate period of time before the sequel comes out. :( The other half a star was deducted because of the font size - I don't know what was going through the minds of the folks at Tor, but a 400+ page book should never be typeset in 8-point letters. Very hard on the eyes.
Don't let the negative reviews fool you - this is a very good book.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
know what to expect, April 10, 2006
This review is from: Kindling (Hardcover)
The reviewer, Mr. Weaver, is right on the money.
The review by AHR is unnecessarily negative.
It appears AHR simply expected one thing and got another and this caused frustration.
AHR is correct in that the setting is sort of a mish-mash of technology and pop-culture references.
But as Weaver points out, this is not a bad thing.
I found it charming, interesting and original.
I didn't think it was done too over the top, and I don't think it detracted from the main story about the protagonists.
There are MANY books and gaming genres that are a similar mish-mash and they've done well. And in the end, we have to remember this IS science-FICTION and the author has the freedom to use whatever elements he chooses to get the story across.
All of that said, I did find a problem with the way the author's own verbose speaking style bled over unrealistically into some of the characters. For example, Bonnie - essentially a teenage farmgirl - suddenly rips off monologues that are lengthy, detailed, articulate, complex, and full of lexicon that no farm-girl would have. This happened with other characters as well when the narrative descriptions would sound VERY much like the dialogue of other characters. It just made it sound more like the author himself was speaking THROUGH the characters instead of observing the characters and letting them speak for themselves.
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9 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A miserable mish-mash, March 1, 2005
This review is from: Kindling (Hardcover)
The only other review posted, by "Harriet Klausner", is evidently by someone who read the jacket notes or the Booklist comments but plainly did not actually read the book.
"Kindling" is a miserable mish-mash, and the person who recommended it to me is going to have to pay. He said it was an alternate history, but it's the worst kind. Farren threw a bunch of stuff in a blender, hit puree, and this mush with mystery nuggets is what came out. It's set in a world where there apparently is no Christianity or Jewry, but people instead either worship the "goddess" or some evil gods, Aksur and Ignir (apparently lifted from Zoroastrianism?) and Zhaithan. But despite all that, it's somehow set in a world where North America has a Virginia, a Richmond, an Albany, etc. Oh, and a prime minister named Jack Kennedy. How clever! Not. Farren at least avoids trying to explain how such a ludicrous history happened.
The characters are not particularly well drawn, and some of the so-called heroes are not people I would care to meet or associate with. The "Lady" from Albany worries on one page she might be raped, but a couple pages later she is willingly having sex with one of the "evil" Mosul officers. The sex slave Jesamine is a least honest about what she is. The two male protagonists are just sort of there: the kid from Virginia is an unformed kid. The soldier from Hispania might have been interesting if given more play but he seems to get the fewest pages.
And the bad guys being "fully developed antagonists"? Hardly. It's 2/3 of the way into the book before any one of them gets more than a page or two of time, and the sister and brother evil mages of Zhaitan turn out to be cardboard baddies that could have been lifted from any fantasy with requisite bad dialog.
And the plot, well, who knows. Not much happens until past halfway, then it ramps up to a quick climax. And then whimpers out to a final paragraph which says "TO BE CONTINUED".
Bleah. I'm amazed this book was published by Tor. Their editors are better than this.
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