Acacia

I ended up reading a lot yesterday, and finally finished Acacia. As said before, it was hard to get into because the writing style 1) bounced around between a lot of characters and 2) did more summarizing than actually showing.

It had some interesting themes and setting, but... Well, there were few primary characters that I got into, and only one I actually came to like. And the whole thing felt pretty bleak, even to me. There are a few fascinating glimpses of how the supernatural can utterly change warfare, I suppose.


I read through somewhere between a third and half the book before "catching up" with the situation stated on the back cover. So everything to that point was predictable. Is the assassin going to succeed in killing the king? Well, yes. Is the monarchy going to fall? Yep. Are the royal children going to survive the change in rulership? Yeah, one way or another. It wasn't until the nine-year time lapse that there was any sense things may not go as they appear.

Leodan is going down, and you know it. It's somewhat sad to see how his ideals were sacrificed on the altar of practicality, but that becomes a theme more or less. Hanish is "the bad guy" who's shown to soften and have his resolve tested, but he never fully loses sight of his main goal - I guess you can respect that, but it's hard to actually like him. Leeka and Thaddeus have their roles, but don't really rise above them to me somehow.

Of the kids, Aliver is almost a ray of hope and goodness with his ideals. That's easy to root for, but I never felt and real depth to his character. Dariel's cute as a raider, but again seems pretty shallow. Corinn I wanted to like, but her shifts in character only disappointed me, especially giving in to the "dark side" at her first glimpse of real power.

Throughout the book, Mena is the only main character I actually liked, perhaps because she shows some actual sense of empathy that remains unquashed even beneath the developing persona of bloody-vengeance-incarnate-swordswoman. If the second book followed her, I'd probably snatch it up as soon as it was released, but that appears contrary to the writer's style.

The story is full of references to legends, and perhaps makes a legend in its own right, but time and again, it's shown that such legends are laced with horrible truths. And the "victory" at the end feels like another step on the path to the fall of the world, driven by people too stupid to see their own folly rather than any insurmountable external force.