Customer Reviews

A Shadow on the Glass (The View from the Mirror, Book 1)

5 star:		(26)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

This is the first book of The View from the Mirror tetralogy (before The Tower on the Rift, Dark Is the Moon and The Way Between the Worlds).

A Shadow on the Glass opens with the story of Llian, a 28-year-old Zain Chronicler of Chanthed. His graduation telling, where he presents the Tale of the Forbidding, is a great success but Wistan, the college headmaster, realizing his student might inadvertantly have uncovered a deadly mystery, harrases him to retract his tale.

That day Karan, a young red-haired sensitive, is in the audience. After a week's walk she finally arrives home in Gothryme, only to be snatched off again by Maigraith, a woman to whom she owes her life. And when the latter asks her to go to Fiz Goro and help her steal a legendary relic, the Mirror of Aachan, from the hands of the powerful mancer Yggur, Karan simply cannot refuse.

But in the citadel, Maigraith is made prisoner, and Karan barely escapes. The book then describes Karan's flight through marshes and mountains chains, hunted by a band of alien Whelm, Yggur's servants. When Mendark, the Magister of Thurkad who is also Llian's former sponsor and Yggur's bitter enemy, asks Wistan to help Karan and bring back the Mirror to him, the headmaster is only too happy to get rid of the dangerous Chronicler and sends Llian.

But the young man is tremendously awkward, and obsessed by the secrets he has recently exposed and which could be the key to the discovery of Great Tale, and in the end it is he who becomes a real burden for Karan. It's only after several weeks of running and hiding that she faces the fact that he probably is her only friend.

A Shadow on the Glass is a bit shallower than what I expected. Although I can say I enjoyed it, I found it hard to concentrate on the story, which somehow failed to grip me, and I hope that in the next volumes it'll become a little more intricate, the characters better developed.

I just don't understand American publishers. First they split up Ash: A secret history (Another mighty fine book) into 4 novels, which totally destroyed the flow. Now, with Irvine's A View from the Mirror, they are doing something similar. Irvine wrote all four books before he approached a publisher, and when first published in Australia and New Zealand they were all released at essentially the same time.

This series works best when read as one. It is one of the most complete examples of creating a world I have ever seen. The detail and complexity of Irvine's Sathenar is astounding. Then there are the characters. One of my biggest problems with most epic fantasy is that the characters are almost always entirely unequivocal. The good guys are sugary sweet and nice and the bad guys are ridiculously evil (cue demented laugh). Irvine avoids this mistake entirely. All his characters are as deep and complex as his settings, the 'bad guys' are most often misguided or stupid and the 'good guys' are far from heroic. If you are looking for clones of Eddings or Brooks, come no further, this book is not for you. If you are looking for something different, something which requires a little mental effort, then dive in.

This is the first book of a great quartet called "The View From the Mirror". If you don't know already, the rest of the books in this series are called: The Tower On The Rift, Dark Is The Moon and The Way Between the worlds.

The series is situated in a place where there are three worlds with their own human species. Then there came a fourth species who are desperate on the edge of extinction, therefore entering the other three worlds, changing the balance between them forever.

Then the female and male protagonists are called Karan and Llian. Karan is a "sensitive" who has unpredictable powers that hardly work for her, while Llian is a brilliant Chronicler whose curiousity forever gets him into trouble.

Karan is forced to steal this mirror that is an ancient relic, not knowing all the trouble that it would cause. Karan and Llian are thrown together by fate and are hunted across the world for the mirror they hold and the secret it possesses.

This is a great starting book to a great series. It's storyline is highly original and unpredictable, where the good guys don't necessarily win all the time. I strongly recommend this book, or this series rather, because the series gets better as you go along. This first book may be a bit slow to start, but it picks up!

This first book in a fantasy series was a huge disappointment. Chapter one sets a wonderful tone with a Great Tale told by one of the main characters, Llian the master chronicler. It is well written, paints a picture of an interesting history and provides a basis for some great plotlines. Then comes chapter two. From there on out - with the exception of another Tale here and there - the reader is subjected to inept villains, inept heroes, and inept writing.

Irvine uses a confusing and chaotic jumble of points of view throughout the story which are distracting and slow the reader due to a constant need to backtrack and figure out who thought what. His plotting is non-existent. The story jumps from one miserable journey and/or chase to the next with a series of miraculous (well beyond normal fantasy miracles) escapes by the bumbling main characters.

It is astonishing that the same person who writes the lovely Tales that are scattered too few and far between in the book could write such a pitiful work around them. Some of the characters show promise but are never fleshed out to any satisfaction. The sentences are choppy, character interactions stilted, and the entire book was a chore to read.

I would have put it down after the first 100 pages had it not been chosen as a selection by my book club. And I'm normally a reader who sticks books out to the bitter end. Many other fantasy series I have read (including Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Tad William's Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, and Michelle West's Sun Sword) have gotten off to plodding beginnings, but redeemed themselves with wonderful stories in the end. This book does not come close to that achievement. If you truly want a series with great writing and characters who blur the line between 'good guy' and 'bad guy', try George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. Avoid this View From the Mirror at all costs.

After reading the glowing, five star reviews that seem to be continually posted for this book, i start to wonder if it was actually the same novel that i read. Well, half read, because i honestly couldn't bring myself to finish it.

i struggled through the main character being ever-so-subtly named after the author (Llian/Ian); i struggled through the info-dump a few pages in, in which said main character explained at great length his entire childhood and life history to an old flame he had already known for years (convenient it only just came up now..). I read through clumsy dialogue, stilted action, cliched characters, and the sheer lack of readability that made me wince. The friend i borrowed this from assures me that the sheer concept behind it all was highly original, but personally i always find a story counts for little if it cannot be told skillfully.

Maybe i'm just being picky, but i can't believe this is what passes for a decent fantasy novel. Sure, it's a first novel, but that shouldn't be an excuse for poor writing. Obviously, considering the massive publicity campaign and three equally bulky sequels that have followed, it hasn't had any effect on either his publishers or sales. But if the story really is as strong as i've been told, then what is really missing is the influence of an editor who should eliminate pieces of obviously amateurish writing within a novel before publication. As far as i know, that is what the editorial process is supposed to be there for...

Well, one bad review obviously isn't going to dent Ian Irvine's four book contract and massive following, but the most i can say for him right now is that this novel is just one long list of things i try to avoid doing when i write myself.

I wouldn't have written this review normally, except to voice my disagreement with some of the most recently posted other reviews here. i can't believe that anyone who seriously read this book could find the characters or dialogue wooden or stereotypical, or anything about this series unoriginal. This series works so well precisely because it is different, and the characters, (where they follow conventional roles, by no means often) never have all of the traditional flaws or graces that charactersistically drive the plots of many fantasy series. I would go so far to suggest that the similarity of some of irvine's characters to fantasy stereotypes makes it all the better when you consider how he subverts said traditional roles with the original yet human ways in which his characters react under pressure (which, lets face it, they are almost always under). Please, if you are going to be swayed yay or nay on this series, at least be swayed by the opinions of people who finished the series, or at the very least, the first book. I have read the series numerous times and love it.

Most fantasy nowadays is so formulaic--wizards and warriors, one-dimensional characters, and plots that steal heavily from Tolkien and his derivatives. Only a few authors have been able to break out of the usual shell of the fantasy genre and still produce good books.

Ian Irvine is one of them. The View from the Mirror quartet presents an epic fantasy in which there is no absolute black and white, the characters are deep but human (and in many cases flawed), and the world is rich, beautiful, immersive, and most importantly believable.

If you're looking for fantasy novels that aren't just hack-n-slash or "kill the evil wizard, save the world," then the View from the Mirror quartet are the books for you!

"A shadow on the glass" is an incredible read. The storyline is thick with details and full of character development. Having read the quartet twice, i found upon re-reading this novel that even the slightest detail mentioned in this book comes back with greater ramifications later on in the story. I found the backdrop of Santhenar and the history of the three worlds a refreshing hight in the often bottom-of-the-barrel trash one usually finds in the fantacy genre. Cleverly, Irvine avoids the formula plot that many fantacies succumb to, by not having any set antagonists. His characters are real and life-like, and the history and culture created for this novel is incredible. I heartily recomend this to anyone who can read.

This long story in four novels (it's not really a quartet) was originally published in Australia in 1998, and then in the UK during 2000 and 2001. It's now reached North American shores being published in 6 monthly chunks by Time Warner. Australian SF and Fantasy is definitely on the rise at the moment, witness the recent publication stateside of some of Sara Douglass' books, so is this one any good?

There is no denying that there is a lot of fantasy on the market at the moment, a lot of it pretty simplistic and generic, some people like that stuff, unfortunately that seems to be where people are heading when they realise after seeing The Lord of the Rings that fantasy is actually a valid genre. Really of course they should be heading to George RR Martin (even at his glacial writing speed), Tad Williams, Robin Hobb and JV Jones. I don't think Irvine's work falls quite into that category but nevertheless it's a lot better than a lot of the dross on the market. Opinion here seems to fall between wonderful and awful, and I can see how a lot of people might dislike it; at the end of the day the characters are not cut and dried and you're not quite sure who's bad and who isn't. From what I can tell the Big Bad hasn't even been introduced yet.

Story wise it moves on quite well, although a few scenes could very easily have been trimmed; and by the end I felt that the plot had moved on (are you watching Robert Jordan).

I would definitely recommend waiting until you have the lot before reading the series though judging from this book. I bought the last 2 from the UK so I could do just that.

I bought this book buy accident. Robert Jordan's `Wheel of Time' series was recommended to me, but I forgot who the author was and purchased this by mistake. The covers do look alike--that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

I think I first realised I was in for a challenge when I saw the `maps' of the world I was about to delve into. I like maps; I like to flick back and forth to see where my characters are in relation to their surroundings. Irvine's maps look like ink blots psychiatrists use to test mental capacity--and mine was sorely tested.

The opening chapters basically outline the entire world and how it evolved. Forget about these chapters, and you'll find yourself lost, as the rest of the book refers to things mentioned only a few times, yet expects you to still have them fresh in your mind.

I kept waiting for the fantasy. I got sick of swamps, mountains, snow and, actually, I was pretty sick of all landscape descriptions. The main character, Karan, goes from a practical rural women with a debt owing, to Lara Croft traversing ravines and escaping ever mounting subplot conspiracies--all she needed was a machine gun (and that handy rope).

Karan's tracked all over the place by powerful `Whelms', evades them at every turn, and just happens to bump into Llian, the wandering minstrel, err, I mean, the brilliant chronicler who's uncovered a perilous mystery.

By the end of the book I didn't give a damn about the `Mirror'. It was the cause of every drama, yet nothing was offered as to its supposed `saving the world' ability. It may as well have been a magic anvil, at least then the author could have padded-out the dialogue with comments on how heavy this block of iron is.

I don't have the rest of the series, and I'm not in a hurry to read them--unless I'm desperate.