Kristen
Full Review: http://fantasycafe.blogspot.com/2007/08/tigana.html
Tigana is the story of a group of people from the nation of Tigana seeking to rectify the wrongs of the past. During a war between Tigana and Ygrath, the Prince of Tigana, Valentin, killed the son of Brandin of Ygrath, a powerful sorcerer attempting to conquer the entire land of the Five Palms, of which Tigana was a part. In retaliation, Brandin not only slaughtered the people of Tigana fighting against him in the war but cast a powerful spell removing the name of the land so that it could only be remembered and heard by the people who were born there. Once the people born in Tigana were dead, the name of Tigana would be lost forever.
While Valentin's son is uniting the people of Tigana as well as other people who despise Brandin and the sorceror Alberico (who is also trying to conquer as much of the land of the Five Palms as possible), Dianora di Tigana masquerades as Dianora di Certando and allows herself to be captured as one of Brandin's courtesans with the intent of killing him and restoring the name of her homeland. However, she finds her job growing more difficult as she finds herself falling in love with Brandin in spite of what he has done to her people.
Tigana is a tale about the danger of two extremes - the danger of remembering the past so clearly that one remains entrenched in it, unable to forget and move on, and the danger of forgetting about the reality of the past. It's a story of love and being torn when you discover the world is not as black and white as once thought. It is one of those rare stories that shows both sides of the coin and reveals that there are consequences to actions and that one person's triumph is another's tragedy.
The characterization was masterful. At the beginning of the story, Brandin was portrayed as an evil bad guy, but once you saw him through Dianora's eyes, you realize he's only human and one who cares about the people around him so much that it overrules his better judgment at times. It takes some talent to make the reader go from despising a character to loving them, and these gray characters are my favorite kinds.
Some people may find Tigana to be a little too angst-filled and repetitive for their tastes. I freely admit it - I like some angst in my stories, but even I found the repetitiveness of the character's thoughts a little much at times and wanted them to get on with the story. This was the only problem I had with Tigana, however.
Overall, Tigana was a spell-binding story that I still keep going back to even though it's been over a week since I finished it now.
Full review here: http://fantasycafe.blogspot.com/2007/05/lies-of-locke-lamora.html
I finally got around to reading The Lies of Locke Lamora after hearing a lot of good things about this debut novel by Scott Lynch. At first, I was afraid it wasn't going to live up to all the good things I had heard about it since I found it a little hard to get into in the beginning, but I ended up absolutely loving this book.
This is definitely not a book to read if you are looking to read something thought-provoking and insightful. However, it is something to read if you are looking for something entertaining. It's a very dialogue heavy book, and a lot of the dialogue is clever and witty. Toward the beginning of the book, I thought it seemed like the dialogue was a bit forced and the author was trying too hard to make it seem clever, but it got better as the book went on.
One thing that some may find annoying is that the entire book switches back and forth between the past and the present. It isn't confusing since the past parts are referred to as interludes (with the exception of the prologue, which goes between the past and further past without as much warning as to when it's changed times). After the prologue, it smoothed out and I ended up enjoying the brief looks into the past.
The characters are wonderful. If you're tired of goody-two-shoes characters who can do no wrong, this might be the book for you. The main character Locke Lamora is a priest of the Benefactor, a god of thievery, and a master of disguise. He and his friends in the priesthood are con men who make schemes to take some money of the hands of the rich noblemen in the city of Camorr, which seems to be modeled after an Italian city. Locke isn't really an evil character, but he's certainly not good either. If you're familiar with D&D alignments, I'd call him some sort of neutral (but definitely not lawful neutral). Also, he's actually a fantasy book main character who is not good at fighting at all - he's much better at using his brain. (And, just to be clear, he's not a mage of any sort either - just a clever rogue.)
I could not put this book down, and I thought it was a fairly unique fantasy book. It did have it's flaws early on and it's not what I'd call a masterpiece of literature, but I had so much fun with it and found it different enough from normal fantasy literature that I have to give it a pretty good score. It was the most entertaining book I'd read in quite a while.
This isn't a great epic fantasy, so don't read them if that is what you are looking for. The books can be a lot of fun if you like playing D&D, though.
This set includes both the best and worst of the Drizzt books. The best of them is Servant of the Shard which is about Jarlaxle and Artemis Entreri and ends up being the starting point for the Sellswords trilogy. The worst book was Spine of the World, which was about Wulfgar.
The Drizzt books are not great works of literature, but they can be fun if you like to play D&D.
This trilogy was written after the Icewind Dale trilogy, but comes before any of the rest of the books. I would recommend reading this one first since it is a good starting point and the writing is at least somewhat better than the writing in the Icewind Dale trilogy.