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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't sweep magic under the rug when it's inconvenient., September 6, 1998
By A Customer
The quality of writing in this book is above average. The book starts out with beautiful prose that distracts somewhat from the story, but the distraction soon passes. The story is set in a world in which the existence of magic is fairly well integrated into the history of the milieu (as opposed to just being slapped on, without thought to historical consequence of people having access to power that doesn't exist in the real world, as most writers do). This is a story about racial prejudice, injustice, loyalty, morality, and ethics; with the issue of the ability to create life thrown in for good measure. I think the author does a stellar job in dealing with all three. Three races are wrapped up in affairs relating to this issue (there is a fourth race, but they are of less importance to the story overall). The first race, humanity, has simultaneously moved into a geographical area, discovered magic, and created a new set of races from domestic animals that look like humans, but have little thought capacity. Humanity does this because the fourth race, dragons, are eating humanity up at a frightening pace, and the humans throw the new created races to the dragons as food (and a few of these new races are kept around as servants). This group of humans migrates away from the dragons, and discovers a more primitive race of man, and promptly enslaves them and destroys their temples. Some of this more primitive race escape to a new homeland. There, this third race rebuilds, and thousands of years later have begun an ongoing campagin of revenge against the first race of humans in a quest to regain their homelands. Into all this is thrown the twinkling of an idea that maybe the second race, created by the humans as dragonbait and servants millennia ago, isn't as bovine/dog-brained/catlike-independent as the first race has been thinking. So many books end abruptly, with the characters either winning through their problem (one way or another), and then "everything is all right" and the world continues on. Not so for this book. The book goes on to the end of the last character's life. We see all the consequences of their actions and decisions during the story. This book has a strong single viewpoint that I found enormously entertaining, the author almost never leaves the main character. No constant hopping around from character to character. I'm glad I read it.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very well written, but..., March 15, 2001
The book is very great, and invokes all sorts of emotions. This is one of those books where the romance is pretty decent ( in a fantasy type of way of course). Surely beats the romance from his Exiles Saga where the girl Flysse is too stubborn in her ways, and the gentleman Arcole becomes all meek! Matter of fact, this book was very well paced compared to Exiles. Made you keep reading, and I didn't think there was really any too slow parts, and this is probably one of the very few books in teh fantasy genre that is well written in the 1st person. You can read from other reviews what this book is about so I am not really going to comment on that. Very well written and all, the only thing that could've worked out better is the actual "behavior" of the characters and the things they do. I.E. The fact that the authority figure from each race would meekly submit after so many centuries of fixed hatred and opinions is pushing a little. But even more than that, the concept of means and end is little backwards. The author seems to think that peace can be won from total destruction of concentration of power that oppose them, not to mention innocent slaughtered for this same peace. I understand fantasy is beyond this world, but since they're about humans, the author should at least follow the same value system we have present in our current world. Learn from our own history to know that what he is proposing won't work (i.e. Germany after the end of World War I). But this disagreement is just on an opinion, and not on the quality of writing.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A solid and powerful piece of fantasy storytelliing, May 21, 2002
Recently the fantasy bug, that comes and goes, has bitten me again. Not wanting to make the commitment to a series, I picked up Lords of the Sky. All in all I was very pleased. As has been stated by nearly every other reviewer, Lords of the Sky, by Angus Wells, is very well written. That is to say the writing style flows well, is colorful, poetic and romantic. The characters - Daviot the Storyteller, Rwan the Mage, Urt the "changed" servant turned leader and Tezdal, the warrior (male, female, male, male, respectively) - are immediately appealing, interesting and identifiable. The reader gets to know them quickly and intimately. Things are explained well and not just taken as is. You feel for these people and their rich chronicles. It has every aspect and characteristic of a great fantasy epic except for one key element; It's only one book. A long book (650 pages), but one book. If one is going to spend so many, many pages establishing characters and histories - in an engaging and exciting way, mind you - than one should spend at least a decent amount of time bringing all of these pieces to closure. At the end of the book there is a lot of telling about what happens and a less amount of showing what happens. Wells spends the last 15% of the book closing the first 85%, and it ended up being a little, just a little, rushed. Still, all questions are answered. No loose ends. It has all the potential of a Stephen Donaldson or a Robert Jordan series. In defense of Angus Wells, he did mention in his closing notes that the book was originally longer and that his editor had him chop it up a good amount. Perhaps she should have let him keep it the length he wanted to write it. Also there was a jolting change of point-of-view segue right in the middle of the book. We read through the main character's eyes - Daviot - when suddenly the storyline changes. We need to know this new information, yes, but Wells completely stops one to start the other. There are no back and forth chapters, which I myself prefer. There is 300 pages of this POV, then there is about 100 pages of that POV. Fortunately the storylines converge perfectly. Finally the main characters, at the end of the book - characters we've grown to care for - go through a major, and rather de-humanizing change. In all the best books characters do change, but it's along the lines of "something lost, something gained." In Lords of the Sky, the characters, at the end, gain much, but they loose much more; they lose what drew us to them for the first 500 or so pages. With all this said, I still HIGHLY recommend this book. It's intense, deep, powerful and resonant of excellent storytelling.
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