12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Start of a Good Thing, September 8, 2010
This review is from: Warrior (Blades of the Rose) (Paperback)
Warrior is the beginning of an exciting new series of historical fantasy romance novels -- three of my favorite kinds of fiction rolled into one. I've been eagerly awaiting these books.
The Blades of the Rose are men and women who work to preserve the freedom of magic in a mid- to late-Victorian fantasy version of our own world. The Blades exist primarily to fight against the Heirs of Albion, a powerful society of men dedicated to finding and controlling the sources of magic in order to bring the entire world under British rule. Each book tells the story of one couple finding love while fighting against the Heirs.
In Warrior, most of the story takes place on the Mongolian steppes. The heroine, Thalia, is the daughter of a Blade, eager to experience her first mission. The hero, Gabriel, has recently left the British army and finds himself in the midst of her mission due to his sense of honor and desire for adventure. As they try to beat the Heirs to a magic source, they also fall in love.
This book has lots of adventure and fight scenes, like the Indiana Jones movies that the cover reminds you of. And yet there is time for both main characters to reflect on their feelings for each other, so the reader gets to watch the relationship develop from both perspectives. There is humor, excitement, passion -- the adventure plot and the romance plot are integrated in a way that really works for me. It's clear that their shared adventure is bringing the couple closer together, and yet the demands and dangers of that adventure could also separate them forever. The success of their mission and the success of their relationship become intertwined, in the tradition of the best romantic suspense novels.
Another thing I love about this book is that Thalia and Gabriel are equals. Not that they don't have some gender bias to overcome, but it's clear to the reader that they need to be equal partners to succeed, and of course that eventually becomes clear to them, too. They have to learn to trust each other, and to work together, but she's no damsel in distress and she kicks ass equally with him.
The world of the book is evoked very well, I thought. The author creates a very complex and detailed setting, particularly in Mongolia, but I never felt that I got bogged down in description or explanation. There is some necessary background information, but it's introduced naturally and not as "info dump." I got lost in the place, the characters and the story and thoroughly enjoyed the ride.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good but not great, March 3, 2011
This review is from: Warrior (Blades of the Rose) (Paperback)
I'm going to join the ranks of the reviewers who've said, "This should have been a five star read for me, but it wasn't."
Indiana Jones went back in time with videos of The Lord of the Rings and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and then used them as inspiration for a collaboration with the cast of a Gilbert and Sullivan show.
It's a great idea, and turned out to be pretty good.
One huge issue I had was that some major idealistic modern ideas were projected onto all of the characters. It's the nineteenth century and yet the heroine was welcomed into secret men's business with open arms. There was no conflict whatsoever between different cultures and races. I had about a thousand times more culture shock moving between England and Australia in the present day than the English hero had being dumped in the middle of the Gobi Desert in the 1800s!
Even so, this is an excellently-researched, intelligently-written, original and largely entertaining read. It has all the ingredients of a fantastic book, and at the beginning I was really into it. I thought, Hallelujah! for once I'm going to agree with the masses.
But then about halfway through I started to lose interest.The first half is almost entirely taken up with nothing more than `Gabriel and Thalia gaze longingly at each other, then the trio ride their horses somewhere. Gabriel and Thalia gaze longingly at each other, then the trio ride their horses somewhere. Gabriel and Thalia gaze longingly at each other, then the trio ride their horses somewhere.' You get the picture.
In fact, I put Warrior aside for a while and moved on to other things. I picked it up again a week or two later and tried again, and yes, I finished it, but the spark was gone.
When I returned, it was as though I'd picked up a different book. More was happening (which was great!), but after the chaste first half, Gabriel and Thalia were going at it like rabbits - with apparently no concern whatsoever about pregnancy. That was one of my biggest problems.
We're in Mongolia, for quite the change, where the virtues of the culture are extolled endlessly throughout the narrative. Stuffy old nymphomaniac Queen Victoria is on the throne, doing her world domination thing. Gabriel Huntley is a working-man's Englishman, fresh out of the military and with no idea what to do with the rest of his life. When he cannot stop the murder of a man in a British alleyway, he takes up the quest to deliver the guy's message to some bloke on the other side of the world. When he gets there he discovers the bloke has a broken leg, so it's up to the man's daughter, Thalia Burgess, local, Batu, and Gabriel to go on a magical quest across the countryside to find a magical artefact of some sort or something.
Admittedly, I've never been one to be overly impressed by gadgets, and so all the `cool stuff' we come across didn't get me too excited. But that's my fault, not the author's.
Gabriel was a brilliant character with a unique personality and way of speaking. He put a smile on my face a number of times. He was definitely too perfect (I mean, come on, he's the newcomer and yet he's the only one who seems to be able to win tournaments and rescue others in this new environment?!).
But yay for another blonde hero! As much as I love Mister 6'3" Black-haired, Blue-eyed, Ten years in the Special Forces, variety is the spice of life. If you write me an original hero, I'm going to love you for it.
My problem was with Thalia, who fell flat. Yes, she ticked all the boxes for an interesting heroine, but she didn't have a personality to go with all those dot points for originality. Other than the fact pickings were slim in the plains of Mongolia, I could not comprehend what Gabriel saw in her.
I became so tired of hearing about how much better Thalia was because she wasn't a normal woman of the day (as though being one was worse than poking a stick at the baby Jesus!). It wasn't at all realistic that all the men would have worshipped her for refusing to conform to gender roles of the time. I know it's a nice fantasy, but it's a jarringly incorrect one. It was the nineteenth century, no matter how you look at it.
Thalia's attitudes towards sex, and her willingness to have it without a single thought of pregnancy or reputation didn't sit right for the times. The English females Gabriel was running from - whose lives featured "embroidery and babies" - wouldn't have really been any different to those in this new land. I highly doubt Mongolian women a couple of hundred years ago were on the Pill and giving up the endless pregnancies and the cooking to enter the corporate workforce! I'd have preferred a strong heroine who lived somewhat within the realms of believability for her time, and quotes such as this one:
"Her father had never expected her to fill the traditional female role"
didn't ring true.
The dialogue was sometimes very appropriately British, and sometimes not at all. The past participle of "spit" is "spat". They should have "written to each other", not "written each other". The word "holiday" should have been used. And "gotten" made far too many appearances.
Small complaints, yes, but as I thought the author otherwise did a wonderful job of giving Gabriel in particular a distinctly British personality, they jumped out at me even more than they otherwise would have.
I did appreciate the fact that while the characters were English, the time period and location were different to standard historical fare (historical romance writers would have you believe the only two places that existed before 1880 were southern England and northern Scotland). That, and I loved that the story was a case of the everyman from England up against the great and mighty British Empire.
So, good, but not great. Warrior showed a lot of potential, but didn't quite have that spark I need to love a book. I'm moving onto the next one, and have high hopes for a story set in the Greek Islands. I will see how I go.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Yeah, this was fun, November 13, 2010
This review is from: Warrior (Blades of the Rose) (Paperback)
I came into Zoe Archer's Blades of the Rose series courtesy of the fine ladies at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, when they chose the second book of the series as a book club read. Pretty much right out of the gate I wanted these books, and I'm not ashamed to admit that a big part of that was because of the covers on Books 1 and 2. First and foremost, I want to thank whoever did the cover art! Gabriel on the cover of Book 1, I'm not ashamed to say, totally slew me for looking like he stole Indiana Jones' outfit, and even aside from that appealing to my fangirl sensibilities, I just found it such a refreshing change from a lot of the shirtless, overmuscled guys on the covers of romance and paranormal romance these days.
Happily, the book itself also proved to be quite enjoyable. Warrior, as the opening book of a series, has the task of setting up the world for us, and it does a nice strong job of doing so by giving us our hero, Gabriel, drawn into saving a man's life in a brutal attack. The man he tries to rescue dies, but not before begging Gabriel to take a message--and a mysterious compass--clear around the world to Mongolia.
Gabriel, you see, has stumbled into the ongoing conflict between two factions at war over magical Sources, artifacts all over the globe which are so named for being the repositories of great power. The Heirs of Albion are bent on securing these Sources for the greater glory of the British Empire, so that Britain might take over the world. Pitted against them are the Blades of the Rose, sworn to avoid using any magic save that which is theirs by gift or by right, and to keep all Sources safe in the hands of their rightful people.
And the man Gabriel has to take the dire message to? He is of course a Blade, living in Mongolia with his daughter Thalia, who is naturally afire with the ambition to follow in her father's footsteps. Neither want to embroil Gabriel in their affairs, but Gabriel won't be put off easily. He has after all come all the way from England at the behest of a dying man. Also, Thalia is awfully, awfully hot.
It's a nifty worldbuilding concept, and Archer has great fun with it, setting up an engaging blend of period adventure and supernatural activity that hearkens indeed back to the aforementioned Indiana Jones as well as the Mummy movies with Brendan Fraser. As these are in fact paranormal romance novels, you do have the obligatory blazing chemistry between the lead characters and more than one sex scene in which they indulge it--but for once, my tastes in such things are actually pretty in line with what a romance novel has to offer with that. Archer's very good at giving her female leads strong sexual agency, and the sense of equality between her heroines and heros is awesome both within and outside of romantic contexts.
In this particular story, as she's been brought up in Mongolia, Thalia is very much afraid that a man from her native Britain will expect her to behave like a proper British lady--and she's delighted to discover that Gabriel, as a commoner and a foot soldier, is just as happy that she's anything but. The two of them must set out to find and protect the Source the Heirs are targeting, and along the way, have themselves quite the adventuresome ride. There's a bit too much obvious pointing at characters who are destined to have their own installments as the series progresses, and a bit too much simplistic motivation on the part of the bad guys. But all in all this was fun and it made me quite interested in continuing with the series. Three stars.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
