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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From first daughter to demon child in one easy step, July 12, 2004
It's not often that a new writer explodes on the scene with book after wonderful book that just takes your breath away. Of course, it helps when the author in question has been writing for a few years in another country and her books are just now coming to North American shores. Such is the case of Jennifer Fallon, who's Second Sons trilogy has just been published in its entirety in North America. Also, the first book of the Hythrun Chronicles has also been published, Medalon. Unfortunately for me, Tor has decided that they don't want to saturate the market and will thus be publishing them once a year. It will be a while before we're caught up. I loved the Second Sons trilogy so much that I had to read Medalon, which is actually the first book that she had written. How does it measure up? Not quite as good as the Second Sons trilogy, but much better than other first novels. The Sisterhood of the Blade rules Medalon ruthlessly, stamping out any hint of heathen beliefs. With the First Sister having just been assassinated, Joyhinia thinks that she's going to be named head of the church. When that doesn't happen, she works a scheme to make it happen. Her daughter R'Shiel and her son Tarja get caught up in it, and find themselves on the run. They fall in with a rebellion against the Sisterhood, and end up even deeper into a massive change that will befall the world. Brak, a Harshini outcast, brings news that the Harshini, long thought dead, may be coming back. And worse, R'Shiel may be the Demon Child that has been foretold. War may be coming to the world, religious or political, with R'shiel and Tarja caught in the middle. Fallon has created yet another fascinating world, with the various politics and religions thought out and explained. There's Medalon with the Sisterhood, the Hythrun who believe in all of the gods, and Karien, where the War God is the only God, and worshipers of all others must fall to the sword. The Harshini, long thought wiped out, commune with the gods and even have some power (at least of persuasion) over them. The world these people live on seems so real and the events of the novel follow logically. Fallon does wonderful work with the characters as well, with almost all of them being perfectly three-dimensional. R'Shiel and Tarja are especially good protagonists, with R'Shiel understandably having trouble accepting her parentage, especially considering her upbringing as the daughter of an ambitious Sister. Tarja has been exiled and is brought back at R'Shiel's insistence (though Joyhinia fought it every step of the way). He's a great military leader and an extremely intelligent man. I did find that R'Shiel's attitude during Tarja and her's initial flight from the capital to be a little bit grating and shrill. She seemed just a little too haughty, but she did mellow a bit as the story went on. Jenga, the captain of the Defenders, is also quite well done, considering he doesn't have a major role (at least not in the first book). Joyhinia has him under her thumb because she knows the truth about Jenga's brother and is quite willing to reveal it if Jenga moves against her. The gods are great characters, too. The goddess of love (I won't name them because some of them travel in disguise and thus naming them would be spoilers) adds complications as she casts a spell on R'Shiel and Tarja that can only make matters worse. The god of thieves is mischievous but can help matters if Brak manipulates him well enough. All of the gods have just a little touch of dimension that makes them stand out, and they are never boring. Sadly, the only character who doesn't quite work is Joyhinia. Being the main villain of the piece, that's a let-down, but she is just this side of two-dimensional. She's the typical power-hungry woman who won't let anything stand in her way. She's ruthless, willing to torch a whole village to keep a secret safe. She rants and she raves and she really isn't that interesting. If Jenga and his other Defenders weren't so beholden to their honour and their oaths, it would be a wonder that they would obey her at all, as she is quite clearly out for her own power at the expense of the Sisterhood and its Defenders. Whether it's the lack of a credible villain or perhaps the quality of writing, Medalon didn't grip me like the Second Sons trilogy did. Perhaps that's the fault of the book being Fallon's first, but I didn't have the incredible urge to finish that I did with the other series. Don't get me wrong, the prose is very good and I found the situation interesting. I just didn't think it was as interesting as it could be. The prose isn't quite as polished. Still, for a first book it is quite good and shows flashes of brilliance at times and definitely indicates Fallon's potential. I wonder if perhaps my thoughts on Medalon have been influenced a little by reading her subsequent work first? Whatever way it is, I can thoroughly recommend Medalon, and I can't wait for the next book to come out. David Roy
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32 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A sadly pedestrian fantasy, September 11, 2005
The pace of this novel is agreeably brisk, which I imagine is what most people are responding favorably to. It does move along. But the writing is incredibly pedestrian and most of the plot "twists" are telegraphed far in advance. The city in which most of the characters live is called "the Citadel." Medalon's defense force is called "the Defenders." Grudge matches are held in an arena called "the Arena." In the very first sentence, the residents of the Citadel gather to witness a funeral pyre imaginatively called "the Burning." The big god of one of the other nations is "the Overlord."
Speaking of names and telegraphed plot twists, do you suppose that the only Citadel dweller whose name contains an apostrophe might not be from the Citadel (even though her adoptive mother, had she had any brains, would have changed her name to conceal her origin)? Do you suppose this character might be the "demon child" referred to early on in the story? Well, duh.
Place and other names are often English words with suffixes tacked on to make them seem exotic (Medalon, Harshini) or weird spellings of perfectly ordinary names (Davydd, Wilem). Have mercy! A courtesan is a "court'esa," a word supposedly adopted from a foreign (to the Medalonians) language that "just happens" to look like the English word "courtesan" with a letter chopped off and a gratuitous apostrophe inserted. Some of the names are too similar (e.g. Tarja and Trayla -- fortunately the latter is dead as the novel begins and isn't mentioned much after the first 50 pages; there were also two other characters whose names both begin with "M" that I couldn't keep straight). The characters themselves are right out of fantasy central casting and don't really have distinct personalities, except for the main villain, who is a caricature of evil and not a real person.
I also found a few instances where the author used a completely wrong word -- for example, one character objects to something "on principal." At another point a grisly task is referred to as "grizzly." This is a clear sign that the author simply didn't know which words are the right ones and couldn't be bothered to look it up. Worse, there were probably a lot more of these in the original manuscript, judging by the number that managed to slip through editing. On one of the section dividers "Grimfield" (another "imaginative" name for a, well, pretty grim prison town) is misspelled as "Grimfiled." This book had at least one Australian edition and a US hardcover edition before the paperback I read, so there is really no excuse for these errors to have persisted.
The spellings do seem to have been successfully Americanized, except for one place where a character jarringly refers to a "gaol break." Readers who are not familiar with British Commonwealth spellings may not know that "gaol" means "jail" (and is pronounced the same) -- this is one word that the author didn't make up!
There are some imaginative ideas in this novel. For example, I liked the idea of magic being derived by harnessing the power of the gods, and of entire nations being in denial of the existence of the gods and persecuting those who did believe. Medalon certainly has some gruesome skeletons in its national closet. Of course, nobody in that country really seems to be ashamed of having committed genocide. One nation believes in a different god than the rest and that god really seems to hate the other ones, and vice versa, which will no doubt figure into future volumes in this series. There even two different kinds of gods, those which exist regardless of belief and those who require believers. This is an interesting backdrop against which a fascinating story could have been written -- but unfortunately "Medalon" is not that story.
I also liked the bit about dragons not being real animals but being agglomerations of shape-shifting demons, subject to coming apart in mid-flight if too far from their home. (Although a word other than "demons" might have been used -- they aren't evil, as readers might expect, and they have no real relationship to the "demon child." I suspect that here, as elsewhere, the author simply used the first word to spring to mind and nobody made her change it to something stronger.)
I don't mean to harp on Fallon. She shows some promise as a writer. But this book's publication was premature -- it should have been returned to the author with a rejection slip, and probably was more than once until it encountered an editor who realized it could be a bestseller despite its many flaws. Still, the fact that a lot of people will obviously buy an unremarkable fantasy like "Medalon" is arguably no excuse for actually foisting it on them.
I'm mystified that this book has received, on average, four stars -- have the other reviewers never read any other fantasy, or are they simply unable to distinguish good writing from merely adequate? People are describing this work as "epic" almost as if they think it actually is! Really, there's much better fantasy to be had out there, and some of it really is grand enough in scope to be referred to as "epic." If you give this book four or five stars, what is left for books that are much, much better than this one?
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A refreshing beginning, June 23, 2004
Having grown rather tired of the entire fantasy genre and it's archetypical formula I found this first book in a series rather refreshing. You get a great spectrum of perspectives on the multiple sides in the building conflict as opposed to the "good guys" and the "bad guys". Strong characters, great pace, political, religious and racial tensions in good balance help get you past otherwise awkward parts. What prevented a five star rating is that Fallon does at times slip into formula rather than stay true to her characters. At certain points she dumbs down her characters to get through to a certain plot point. On such example is one of the main characters going through the "but I don't want the responsibility of these powers, I just want things to be normal again." which is completely incongruous with an otherwise strong, perceptive and driven character. One also wonders how the supporting character Brak can be so incompetent. His capacity to lose his charge and completely miss the obvious time and time again is rather amazing for someone with his supposed lineage and history. The last criticism is that the USA cover is HORRIBLE. It makes the book look like any other generic, yawn inspiring fantasy epic. If I hadn't been in London and seen the UK cover I would never even have picked up the book. Overall a great book and I was able to overlook the weaker spots, hoping that the rest of the series grows stronger as it matures.
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