Customer Reviews

Mistress of the Pearl (The Pearl, Book 3)

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Mistress of the Pearl (2004) is the third Fantasy novel in The Pearl series, following The Veil of a Thousand Tears. In the previous volume, Kurgan learned that Nith Batoxxx was possessed by the Archdaemon Pyphoros. Then he learned that a Gyrgon had tampered with Terrettt's brain and was certain that it was Nith Batoxxx. When Kurgan, Sornnn and Batoxxx/Pyphoros transitted to Za Hara-at, they found Riane waiting for them. In a battle where the daemon was attacked by everybody and everything, Nith Batoxxx was killed and the daemon was consigned to the Abyss. Then Riane entered Otherwhere with the Veil of a Thousand Tears and freed Giyan's avatar.

In this novel, Krystren, a Sarakkon Onnda, sails on the Oomaloo to the Northern continent in a mission for the Orieniad. She carries a message for her brother, Courion, captain of the Omaline. As they approach their destination, a sudden storm drives them away from land and into the Illuminated Sea. There they run into a reef and the Oomaloo rapidly breaks up. Two boats get away from the ship, but are attacked by a Black Chimaera. The first mate, an agent of the Sintire, attacks the captain and kills him, but then Krystren kills him. Krystren, the only survivor, paddles the figurehead of the Great Mother Yahe toward shore. She reaches the strand with a little help from the Black Chimera.

After a long nap, Krystren climbs the cliff up to a ledge, which leads to a manmade tunnel. At the end of the short tunnel is a wall, with a door in it. When she cannot open the door, Krystren falls asleep beside it. Later the opening door wakes her and she hides behind it. A black robed and hooded man comes through the door and climbs a stairway that she had previously overlooked. Then he comes down the stairs leading a young man with a glazed look in his eyes. Calling him Dar Sala-at, the cloaked man leads him to the door. Krystren has already snuck into the next room and watches the pair descend a long pole down into a large cavern. She climbs down part way and sees a green dragon in a cage.

Giyan has been training Riane, the true Dar Sala-at, in sorcery. Now she teaches her how to cache her magic books in the Other Side, the null space between realms. They use a mirror, which reminds the rappa Thigpen of necromancers and banestones. Despite Giyan's attempts to change the subject, Thigpen continues to provide Riane with basic information on the banestones.

Kurgan, the new Regent of the V'oorn, is attending a burial service for Courion on the Omaline. Unfortunately, the Sarakkon crew have no body to bury. While he knows that Curion's body is within Nith Batoxxx's laboratory in the goron-wave chamber, Kurgan doesn't tell the crew that Batoxxx had killed their captain. The crew substitutes Curion's favorite sea dirk for his body.

Kurgan returns to his kashiggen to smoke laaga and think about Eleana. He saw her with Riane in Za Hara-at and is still obsessed with her. Nith Nassam interrupts these thoughts and takes him to Nith Batoxxx's laboratory in the Temple of Mnemonics. Kurgan makes several attempts to win concessions from Nassam, but all are denied. Nassam insists that Kurgan will do only what Nassam tells him to do, no more and no less. Kurgan reacts in his typical manner: he determines to get the better of all Grygons.

As Riane is gazing in the mirror, she is overcome by a vision of her prior life. She is walking through a windswept landscape to a high wall. She fits an enormous key into an iron lock and opens the gates. Inside the walls is a courtyard laid with pink gravel. It is bisected by a black path. A pair of fountains flank the pathway, one labeled MEMORY and the other OBLIVION. She wakes from the vision with a gasp. Giyan explains the vision as a construct built by Riane. In it are stored all of Riane's memories. The ones marked OBLIVION are presently unavailable to her, but they may be restored.

Riane, Eleana and Thigpen venture into the Regent's palace once again to try the Storehouse Door. After a chase by Kurgan and his Haaar-kyut, they accidentally slide down the wrong path at the triple intersection. There they encounter the Hagoshrin, who ignores Riane's claims of being the Dar Sala-at; he is only interested in feasting on her bones. But Riane and Eleana escape from the Hagoshrin and find the Storehouse Door. This time the door opens when Riane puts her finger in the Ring of Five Dragons. She walks through, but the door closes in Eleana's face. Inside is the Hagoshrin, but now it is aware of her identity as the Dar Sala-at and cooperates.

Sornnn and Minnum, the reformed sauromician, have found a banestone in the ruins of Za Hara-at, but it disappears from their possessions. Riane learns from the Hagoshrin that the sauromicians have eight of the banestones, but that Kurgan has the ninth stone. Moreover, Kurgan now has Eleana. The Hagoshrin takes Riane and Thigpen to Kurgan's hiding place to retrieve Eleana and the ninth banestone.

In this story, Riane locates the Pearl, but finds that it is not exactly as the prophecies foretell. Kurgan achieves his highest desire. Marethyn finds another way of life in the Kundalan Resistance. Everything is changing, but this volume only shows the beginnings of that change. So many plot lines are left dangling. Does this mean that a sequel is forthcoming?

Be warned that the author does not hesitate to kill off the major characters. But don't expect these characters to remain dead; at least one is resurrected from the land of the dead and others cheat death one way or another. And one dead good guy comes back as a villain!

Recommended for Lustbader fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of transformation, unexpected plot twists and powerful magic.

-Arthur W. Jordin

yes the book is hard to put down and is definitely better than the second installment. but is still a drag in places.

negatives :

1. unnecessary development of new situations/characters unrelated or marginally related to the central plot - especially the endless array of khaggun colonels, marshals, generals, their daughters etc (hard to keep track of who is who!), sarakkon and sauromagicians etc. in contrast the central plot/characters lack adequate development.

2. the nawatir is supposedly the dar salat's protector - but in this book neither of them are even together at any point in time! also when we first heard about the nawatir we thought that he would kick khaggun butts! but for all his prowess, he keeps getting beaten up!

3. why should the good guys always struggle? in each and every difficult situation they confront they never have it easy - they alway get beaten up initially and only later they prevail. it gets tiring after a while.

i thought this series was a trilogy and was keen to see the conclusion. but apparently it is going to go on. hopefully not like robert jordan's eye of the world series on which the twilight has set!

Many years ago, I read Van Lustbader's Dai-san trilogy and thought...this guy should stick to thrillers. He has a knack. But then his thrillers became stale and formulaic. He has re-invented himself as a writer with the Pearl series, of which, this is the third installment.
Kundala rivals Raymond E. Feist's Midkemia. It is a land of the usual fantasy novel with high-tech thrown in. It's a well-done blend. Characters are well-developed and the dialogue is, at times, highly entertaining....way beyond the usual. These characters have senses of humour, bad days and good ones.
Given the ending, it's likely we will see more of this world and I can hardly wait.

Whoever said "getting there is half the fun" must have been an avid literary adventure fan. For Eric Van Lustbader's hefty science fiction/fantasy thriller, MISTRESS OF THE PEARL, the intuitive reader should be warned to ratchet up that old maxim to say that getting there provides nearly all the fun.

It's been a while since I've read anything by the justly acclaimed Van Lustbader, so I must confess straight up that the two previous volumes in his epic Pearl saga are not on my have-read shelf. (In retrospect, they should be...) And for Van Lustbader, creative continuity is everything. There's no gentle warm-up, no teacherly recap, no summary of previous highlights. He opens with a shipwreck on the exotic planet of Kundala and you, poor reader, are thrown headfirst into storm-tossed waves to thrash around with everyone else and create some sense of bearing as best you can.

If you've ever traveled to a country where no one spoke your language (and vice-versa), that's the general feeling that results from swimming through the first few dozen pages. Yet you're there, submerged in it, and you don't really want to leave; the alien landscape may seem life threatening, but it's also magnetically alluring. So, like Van Lustbader's enigmatic characters, with their tantalizing and obscure pedigrees, you forge ahead looking for patterns in his intense fabric of inter-species relationships --- and perhaps try to become part of them.

Yes, there is a mystical Pearl that's supposed to set everything right; yes, there is a Mistress, whose authority is all but unrecognized. There's also an omnipotent but maddeningly capricious super-goddess with a supposedly cosmic plan; and of course there are "good" and "bad" forces embodied in a variety of beings, whose motives are not always clear. In short, little or nothing is as it seems and even the characters on the sometimes-fuzzy side of "right" end up entangled in all sorts of moral and political undergrowth.

It's that amazing verbal and imaginative "undergrowth" of Van Lustbader's cosmically vast plot structure that grasps and holds the attention of any reader who appreciates clever imagery, graphic action, and surprisingly disciplined prose in such a long book (nearly 600 pages). In this lush jungle of improbable life, fascinating, frightening and endearing individuals exist side by side in a strange mixture of conflict and detente. In fact, politics alone weave a magical, circuitous web that keeps MISTRESS OF THE PEARL tight, edgy, and surprisingly agile throughout.

By all means, get hold of the preceding RING OF FIVE DRAGONS and VEIL OF A THOUSAND TEARS and read them beforehand if you can. But if MISTRESS OF THE PEARL crosses your path first, take a leap of literary faith into Van Lustbader's vivid universe --- and enjoy a breathtaking ride.

--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch

Lustbader is a very creative author with an enormous capacity of Fantasy..you are nurtured here with many forces that takes you to a different level of reading a novel.Is interesting and it works to read it..Is different than the previous I read from him.
In fact you have to read an author in order to know him.This book has been another step and side in his way of writing.

I was happy to find this book. I had read the the first book in the trilogy and wanted the 2nd parts and 3rd

Well crafted.I enjoyed it as much as the first two books in "The Pearl" Series. There is plenty of room left for more, but 6 years have passed without another installment!

Book 3 of the series is equal to the previous 2. I liked it & it "really" is age appropriate for my teenage granddaughter. However, I thought this was the final book, but I got the impression that yet another book was to follow.

I guess this was not the book for me...I have read another book of Eric Van Lustbader and loved it...This one not so much

Though they have pretty much conquered the planet Kundala after a century plus of resistance, the victorious aliens V'ornn remain in combat with the locals. The natives believe their Messiah, the "Dar Sala-at" will save them. Just the Kundalan belief that their legendary savior will help them overthrow the V'ornn invaders has lifted the spirits of the natives and helped them resist the intruders though how someone can join two spirits from opposite poles of the universe as the fabled champion will do seems hard to fathom especially by the V'ornn.

However, the impossible occurs when a Kundala female Riane contains her own soul and that of the dead Annon, ironically a V'ornn; the merger of two essences from opposite sides of the universe. The Kundalans believe that Riane is the Messiah who will vanquish the conquerors, but to do so they must obtain the mystical Pearl that only the true Dar Sala-at can yield its power.

Part humor, part military science fiction, and part fantasy, the third Pearl tale is a gem of a novel that uses amusing satirical slapstick moments to ease some of the major tension. The story line is action-packed and filled with adventure as series fans will delight in the rebellion but especially with the paradox of Riane-Annon. New readers will enjoy the tale as it is a stand alone, but even greater understanding especially with the V'ornn will occur by reading the delightful previous two epics (see RING OF THE FIVE DRAGONS and THE VEIL OF A THOUSAND TEARS).

Harriet Klausner