2013 books: 46-48

[the_siobhan]

    

The Pillar of the Sky by Cecelia Holland I definitely bought this on sale. It still has the $1.49 pricetag on the front cover. A boy outcast from his tribe has a vision of Stonehenge. He grows up to make building it his life's mission, and through manipulation, trickery and intimidation, the life mission of everybody around him. This is a long book, much longer I think than it needs to be given how much space is devoted to, "the stones were heavy and the workers complained a lot and the chief bullied the hell out of them because unions hadn't been invented yet". The language is very simple since it's written with the vocabulary of the particpants so it ends up being a quick read anyway.

Not terrible but it didn't really suck me in.

    

The Coming of the King by Nikolai Tolstoy Man, is this guy wordy. This is the first book in a series about Merlin the Mage, told by his ghost and starting with the circumstances of his birth. It includes all the fantastical elements of the story - his mother was impregnated by a spirit or demon, he was born speaking and with knowledge of the laws of both mortals and immortals, an attempt to drown him as a baby led to him spending the first 40 years of his life in the form of a fish.

The book is written in the form of a bardic tale, full of embelishment and detail and consonent-strangling Celtic names. Which results in sentances like; "The King and his company rode from the Lake of Reghed where the Black Sow was birthed by the Demon Queen of Targhedahn and was fated to rise up to destroy the both the Kingdom of Greenbrogh of the Red Hand and that of King Blakenspttlm, known as the One Eye, having lost it's twin in the Battle of Gorgenwhatsis; and from thence they travelled for many days and nights until they reached the mountains of Eridwyn, with the caps of snow as fair and white as the naked bosom of Gwynfaddahr the Unchaste..."

You get my drift. Both very impersonal and also as wordy as hell.

I was always fascinated by the Merlin character, which is why I bought the book in the first place. But about a third of the way in I realized that I was reading it just to finish it and not actually enjoying the story. So into the giveaway pile it goes.


    

Wrapt in Crystal by Sharon Shinn No idea where I got this one. The story takes place on a desert planet colonized by humans. There are no aliens but they are mentioned as existing in this universe. It starts off as a murder mystery, but about halfway through it switches over into a romance. Unfortunately that means it doesn't really do either genre well.

The book has the feel of existing within a larger landscape - I haven't read any other Shinn but from this story I would expect that she has other novels set in this Universe. I originally thought that the main character might also have other stories about him out there - he started out having the feel of a character with soem backstory to him - but by the end of the book I had changed my mind. The story just wraps up too neatly.

So overall, just ok. A fast read, entertaining enough, but not one I would bother to repeat. Giveaway pile.