July 27, 2005
The View From The Mirror: Wimpy guys & strong girls
I've _finally_ finished The View From The Mirror quartet by Ian Irvine. It's four unnecessarily thick volume which I started reading waay back in 2001 but couldn't finished it. I got stuck in the last few chapters of book 3 and totally lost interest in it. Recently I decided to pick it up again and decided to re-read book 3, this time I managed to finish it.
The story set in Santhenar, one of the three worlds in the book story. A place where the secret art (magic) is hard to use and exact a horrible price on its user. The book follows Llian, a teller, which gotta be the most wimpy lead character of all time in the history of fantasy novel. Most of the time I feel like want to scream to Llian face to say "Get a grip". In fact all of the male character in Ian Irvine's world are either wimpy, or weak, or annoying, or proud to the point of folly or corrupt.
Luckly for Llian, he met Karan, the other main character in this story. Unlike Llian, Karan is strong willed, hot headed and really can take a pounding. And that pretty much describe the rest of the women characters. Irvine definitely put women as the heroes and foes in his book, while the male (apart from Llian) are just fillers. The books then follow the journey of the two.
The story actually is quite good with multiple layers of plot and sub-plot throughout the book. The problem is often Irvine started to wandering in his story and preoccupied with describing things that totally unnecessary, like the 2 full pages about Llian dinner. Please ... is "seafood" not enough? This is why I think 4 books of about 600 pages each on paper back is too long - that's a total of 2400 pages. He could have done this in a lot shorter (say 3 books!) and keeping the pace a lot quicker. Had he done that I would have recommended this book to others.
My brother seems to like it, he bought the first book in the second quartet, "Geomancer". I've read the first chapter and much to my dismay it has another strong female character, another sneaky female foe and just as thick (600+ pages). Nope don't have the time for that now Ian, I think I'll re-start "The Farseer Trilogy", yet another series that I abandoned near the end of the second last book (this time the second book).
Posted by vhadiant at 10:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
