Customer Reviews

The Spirit Stone: Book Two of The Silver Wyrm

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

All of these books in this series (and I have read them all) are absolutely spellbinding. You are on the edge of your seat waiting for the next episode. Well written and extremely exciting.

If you are looking to get into this series, I wouldn't recommend this book as a first, but that is the only reason why I didn't give it a 5. It would be like reading the second half of Tolkien's Two Towers. Without reading the summery. Start with Daggerspell, the first book of the series. If you are willing to put the time into this series, it is excellent, richly coloured, well-written, and complex. The Spirit Stone is another from Kerr's mould. One extra positive is that the characters in The Spirit Stone are mostly established ones.

One aspect of Kerr's Deverry series I like best is how she weaves past actions into the present conditions, the Celtic Knot as she calls it. The cycle of wyrd is what she calls karma. For those of a more physical bent, call it Newton's Third Law of Motion, paraphrased to mean: "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

Will the souls of Nevin, Cullyn, Rhodry, and Jill finally work out their enmeshed karma from past mind passions like anger, lust and vanity? Will Salamander recover from wasting his life being a chattering elf? Many other stories are swept up into this ongoing saga, written against the background of a impending invasion by an ancient enemy to all the allied races.

Kerr's Deverry series is the most extensive and enthralling series I have ever read, and this book is a positive contribution to that effort.

While I found the entire series to be well written and highly entertaining, the one thing I do not like is the way Ms Kerr jumps back and forth in time. She justifies this by comparing the series to a Celtic knot, which winds back and forth across itself. Celtic knots or no, a cord unravels in the same way it was woven. While the past/present style has lots to recommend it, Mr Kerr takes it to extremes, moving back and forth frequently in each book, over a period of 400+ years, all while expecting the reader to be able to keep track of re-occurring characters in their many reincarnations and situations. It's a daunting task, and not one that makes for easy reading. And that task is made even more difficult by errors in her table of reincarnated personalities that is in each book.

Once I had the entire series, I went thru each book, marked each section with it's time frame, then re-read the entire series in chronological order. My, how much better that was!