Customer Reviews

The Wooden Sword (Walensor, No. 1)

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

 

 

"You can't judge a book by it's cover" is all well and good, but all we have is blurbs and recommendations if we do not wish to read every single book in any given store.
So I bought it because the blurb and the cover were interesting.
After reading it, I was very disappointed to be left hanging in the midst of the story! I can get that in real Life! I want my happy ending! Sheesh!
Now I find there Is Indeed a following book "Under the Web". I'll bite. But I really wold have prefered to have known ahead of time I was only getting half the story.
My recommendation is to only purchase this book If you can get it with it's follow up, otherwise, skip it.
The characters are good from my point of view because they do stupid things at the wrong time, act like idiots, but have a greater depth to themselves ... pretty much like real people. Sometimes they say one thing, and do another, while trying to be good, honorable people to their own minds. Just like the rest of us.
It is my fervent wish that books were always offered bundled with the others in their series, not as an only point of sale, but for those of us who are interested, but dislike being left hanging. They could at least Mention it.
Thank you for reading my two cents worth (grin)
~Mariance

Running away from a marriage she does not want, Berika daughter of a shepard, prays to the forest goddess and finds Dart. Man, demon, fetch, you don't know, and the whole story takes you on a trip where you can not preguess the plot or the ending. The only problem with this book is that it is very much a lead in to the next book. Fortunately Lyn Abbey wrote the sequel 'Under the Web' instead of leaving us hanging. My big regret is that there isn't a whole series of these books. Lyn Abbey has a tendency to create a fascinating new world, write a book or two, and then drop it. On the other hand, Lyn Abbey's books never seem to accumulate the fame that they deserve, so perhaps somewhere there IS a third book, waiting to be published.

"Of all the living things in Eyerlon, the trees were the oldest... and the wisest. A generation ago, the ancient forests of Walensor swallowed up the young princeling Dart. All the kingdom presumed him dead. But, enclosed in the bark of the oldest tree, Dart was still alive--a human vessel of the trees' greatest secrets ... and most powerful magic. Twenty years later, Dart was released. The trees had given him the most precious of gifts: A wooden sword, a harp, and timeless wisdom. The trees also gave him a great and terrible mission: To save his world from a powerful tyrant, a dark wizard of smoke... and fire."

When I began reading this book I could not put it down. Following Berika and her frustration at not being able to reach the Web, her meeting with Dart, and their subsequent journey... this all was wonderful. However, about halfway through the book it began to lose the charm and style of the beginning and I began to lose interest. A good book for fantasy lovers, if you can pick a copy up.

The Wooden Sword collapses under the weight of an uninteresting plot and unlikable, often depressing characters whose behavior and motivations are confused and inconsistent. Berika is a young woman who lives in Walensor, which is ruled by an enormous pantheon of dieties with whom people communicate through the Web of Walensor, a field of magic power made up of energy called basi. Everyone on Walensor is born with some basi, and people have learned how to store basi in material objects, but very few people actually are able to become true mages and use basi to commune with the gods. Berika lives in a tiny rural community where she has been betrothed in marriage to a dispicable cretin. Naturally, she is frantic to find a way out, and one day offers up a desperate prayer to her local diety. The surprising result is that she summons up a "fetch," who turns out to be a young man named Dart, who possesses a strange harp that is brimming over with basi. Deciding the harp is the real answer to her prayer of deliverance, Berika plans to sneak away with it, not to learn how to harness its magic, but simply to sell it for enough gold to move so far away no one can ever find her. Yet it turns out that Dart is really after all a human being, who was spirited away by the goddess Weycha many years before to act as her champion. Now Weycha charges Dart with protecting Berika and getting her safely to Eyerlon, the city where the Web of Walensor is generated. So, after several distinctly unpleasant scenes in which Dart must not only deal with the nearly psychotically superstitious people of Berika's village, but save Berika from her doubly psychotic husband, Dart and Berika find themselves on the road to Eyerlon. I would have to look long and hard to find a less pleasurable reading experience than witnessing Dart's having to deal with villagers shouting "Demon!" at him when he's never done anything the least bit threatening, or putting up with the weirdly inconsistent behavior of Berika and her mother, who seem gentle and loving one moment and almost monstrously hostile the next. Berika is hopelessly confused, which, at first, is fine, because of the situation she finds herself in. But she never seems to change. One minute she's desperate to flee her village, the next she's utterly resigned to her lot in a way that resembles clinical depression. Then back again! Abbey wants us to sympathize with her by ruthlessly depicting all her beatings and implied rapes by her vile husband; but when Dart retrieves the titular weapon from a magical tree and finally does the creep in, she's suddenly afraid of him. This is one fantasy heroine who doesn't need magic; she needs Prozac! Abbey herself even describes Berika as a "snarling girl," leaving me to wonder why the hell she thought any reader would find Berika a sympathetic fantasy heroine in the first place. Helpful hint to writers: causing your reader to actually hope something ill befalls your protagonist is not the idea. Berika is unforgivably spiteful and stupid. Despite her life of abuse and terror back home, she is for reasons hard to make out deeply resentful towards Dart for taking her on this journey to Eyerlon, a trip that she initially wanted to make anyway, and at one point she even whines in self-pity, "Without Dart, I wouldn't be here at all. I'd be safe at home..." Excuse me? Safe at home? Where she has been thrown against walls hard enough to crack plaster? Where she has been threatened with disfigurement? At times like these it is hard to tell whether or not this is a case of of Berika's being an idiotic character, or Abbey simply not knowing what the heck she is doing as a writer. Whatever the case, misguided characterizations and joyless storytelling rob the reader of any reason to read this novel......