Alera
So, I read Furies of Calderon. It's been recommended by some friends, I've enjoyed Jim Butcher's Dresden Files, and it was finally purchased for me as a gift. Verdict? It's perfectly fine fantasy fare - not displeasing, but it doesn't really separate itself from the pack.
Fury-based magic is interesting enough, though it doesn't feel fully fleshed out. It would probably feel more unique to me if Avatar: The Last Airbender hadn't presented a heavily-elemental type of magic to me first. The two aren't the same, mind you, but there are similarities. I find myself wanting to see a better explanation of what personality furies have and why they bond with Alerans.
The heroes are likable enough. I somehow pictured Amara as younger in the beginning than she seems to be. Tavi is... well, a cliche "disadvantaged" person with a great destiny. Through the whole book, his lack of furies feels like it's just a setup for him getting access to 1) the most powerful of them or 2) some other, greater power (maybe both). He just happens to have been born less than a year after the last Marat invasion. His aunt's behavior and a rather blatant (to my eyes) hint toward the end indicate she's not his aunt. And she fears newcomers have come for him, even before knowing the threat they actually pose, which indicates there's some reason someone would want to come after him. Seeing things so heavily foreshadowed like this is a little disappointing to me, but really not atypical for the genre.
The villains are a mixed bag. The insane ex-slave water witch actually seems interesting to me. Mister "You are not Araris Valerian" seems shallow and boring to me, on the other hand. He's the sort of character that might have seemed cool and inspiring to me when I was in high school reading Forgotten Realms books with Drizzt Do'Urden.
And death... or lack thereof it. Off the top of my head, I can think of five times in the book when one of the main characters "should" have died, but was miraculously watercrafted back to health. In the end, I think only a couple secondary villains actually did die. This is a prime example of how resurrection-type magics can cheapen death in a fantasy setting. It leaves me feeling rather ambivalent toward the notion. "Character stabbed through the heart? Oh, just get a watercrafter over there."
But for all my negativity here, it's not that the book is bad. It's just that I feel I've seen most of it before. Repeatedly.
This line of thinking actually brings me back around to the Mistborn series again. Those felt like more "advanced" fantasy books to me, in that I think I got more out of them because I was familiar with fantasy cliche. That series took a number of things I would expect and turned them upside-down.
Fury-based magic is interesting enough, though it doesn't feel fully fleshed out. It would probably feel more unique to me if Avatar: The Last Airbender hadn't presented a heavily-elemental type of magic to me first. The two aren't the same, mind you, but there are similarities. I find myself wanting to see a better explanation of what personality furies have and why they bond with Alerans.
The heroes are likable enough. I somehow pictured Amara as younger in the beginning than she seems to be. Tavi is... well, a cliche "disadvantaged" person with a great destiny. Through the whole book, his lack of furies feels like it's just a setup for him getting access to 1) the most powerful of them or 2) some other, greater power (maybe both). He just happens to have been born less than a year after the last Marat invasion. His aunt's behavior and a rather blatant (to my eyes) hint toward the end indicate she's not his aunt. And she fears newcomers have come for him, even before knowing the threat they actually pose, which indicates there's some reason someone would want to come after him. Seeing things so heavily foreshadowed like this is a little disappointing to me, but really not atypical for the genre.
The villains are a mixed bag. The insane ex-slave water witch actually seems interesting to me. Mister "You are not Araris Valerian" seems shallow and boring to me, on the other hand. He's the sort of character that might have seemed cool and inspiring to me when I was in high school reading Forgotten Realms books with Drizzt Do'Urden.
And death... or lack thereof it. Off the top of my head, I can think of five times in the book when one of the main characters "should" have died, but was miraculously watercrafted back to health. In the end, I think only a couple secondary villains actually did die. This is a prime example of how resurrection-type magics can cheapen death in a fantasy setting. It leaves me feeling rather ambivalent toward the notion. "Character stabbed through the heart? Oh, just get a watercrafter over there."
But for all my negativity here, it's not that the book is bad. It's just that I feel I've seen most of it before. Repeatedly.
This line of thinking actually brings me back around to the Mistborn series again. Those felt like more "advanced" fantasy books to me, in that I think I got more out of them because I was familiar with fantasy cliche. That series took a number of things I would expect and turned them upside-down.
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