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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Feist's formula is as broken as the Kingdom's crown, March 23, 2000
This review is from: Shards of a Broken Crown: Volume IV of the Serpentwar Saga (Serpentwar Saga/Raymond E. Feist, Vol 4) (Hardcover)
I feel sorry for those people (including myself) who were suckered into buying the hardback version of this novel. If you truly want to know what happens in this, the conclusion of Feist's Serpentwar Saga, get the paper back...heck, borrow the book from your local library. Over the course of Feist's 10 books set in this world of Midkemia, he has developed memorable characters and a winning formula, then slowly ruined it all with his weak, disjointed plot and incoherence. Developments occur out of the blue, there is no sense of consistency, and the rules of the game are revised continuously according to his whim, giving no sense of history and destroying the foundation that he laid in Magician. The only redemption I could find in this book were the two main characters, James and Dashel, who make the novel bearable enough to complete. All of the old favorites are either dead (Arutha) or uninteresting (Pug, Nakor, Tomas). Feist has lost the edge he displayed in producing Magician, and we are left with the shards of a washed-up writer.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A good plot, bad writing..., September 30, 1999
By A Customer
As a long-time Feist fan, I must say that the latter two books of this series has been disappointing. Shadows of a Dark Queen and Rise of a Merchant Prince were quite good in character development and it seemed the plot was going somewhere, much like the original Riftwar series. Then Rage of a Demon King and now this book, Shards of a Broken Crown, seem to be hurried and rushed. The previous major characters in the first two books are either killed or marginalized, while new characters and secrets are revealed at an alarming rate. Several story lines are not even fully explained to satisfaction, for example the refugee lizard-riders who were vassals of the snakes-priests. They only appear occassionally, and even in this final book they are given such a short amount of notice one wonders why Fiest used them to start off this series anyways. As for Miranda, I'd say the old Pug wouldn't even look at a two-timing tramp like her. And the Kingdom of the Bitter Sea? After Feist kills off all the old-time heroes all we get in the Kingdom basically rolling over and letting this happen? And Pug just sits around and does nothing? In short, Fiest attempts too much in too little space and strays from the Riftwar-type writing that enchanted readers such as myself.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well..., January 9, 2001
I was very apprehensive when I first bought this book. Having finished Magician, I had gone on a bit of a Raymond Feist spree, buying every Midkemia book that he's ever written (as well as the Empire trilogy). The Riftwar saga I recommend almost unconditionally, at least the first four books. The next two books were still better than almost anything else out there, but somehow I thought they were lacking. The Empire trilogy was excellent, kudos to both of them. I assumed the Serpentwar saga would be just as good as his other books. Wrongly, it seems... The series seemed to decline a little more every book, but I thought that maybe this book would be able to pull it all together for a spectacular ending. Nope. The book, beyond countless typos and spelling errors, also gives me the feeling that it was rushed. The ending, while I won't give it away, I will say that it was extremely abrupt and incomplete. The casual killing off of one of my favorite characters, Greylock, for no apparent reason, did not put me in the best of moods. I really don't think that you should just kill off any of the important characters if their dying has no effect whatsoever. Erik mourns for ten seconds or so, then Greylock is completely forgotten, never to be mentioned again. While I like the fact that Feist is beginning to focus on the large picture, as another reviewer said, he's leaving out small details such as character development. However, the main thing that really ruined the series was Pug. Three and 99/100 books pass, and Pug doesn't lift a danged finger. Then, after lots of war and lots of innocents dying, he finally intervenes. (Interestingly enough, the reason Pug doesn't help at first is because he doesn't want to kill all the enemy soldiers, since they all have families etc... Er, what about the people of the Kingdom, don't they have families too? Oh well...) In approximately 2 seconds, Pug eliminates the enemy leader and sends his compatriot back through a gateway to hell. (Now, if the evil guy had an IQ higher than 5, he would know not to put his headquarters right next to the gateway, since the only way to get rid of him is to send him back) But, in only 2 pages or so, Pug easily kills off the enemy guy, and everyone lives happily ever after. All the work of the tens of thousands of Kingdom soldiers, giving their lives for their country, is nothing compared to what Pug can do in 2 pages. Riiiight... Really, one of the reasons Feist's books are going stale is because a few select (immortal, of course) god-characters can take out ANYTHING they come up against. 400 pages telling about the hardships of the army and the common citizens, then Pug comes in and does in five minutes what the entire army could not in several years. So if you'd like, just read the last 15 pages or so, since everything happening before that is completely irrelevant. If Feist doesn't come up with a way of dealing with the god-characters, as well as maybe changing his formula a little, his books are doomed to the bargain bin. I really hope this doesn't happen, since, as Feist showed with his Riftwar saga, he really is a superb author.
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