Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn

[lightreads]

Mystic and Rider by Sharon Shinn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The story of a glorified road trip through a fantasy kingdom during which our heroes talk endlessly about the looming evil and yet have an incredibly hard time grasping it's obvious plans, at least until they finally meet up with looming evil, who proceeds to narrate the evil plan but never actually do a single thing, and then the book ends.

I liked this, but *points up* I'm not really sure why. The strength of this book is in the romance, which is pretty rare for these fantasy/romance hybrids, in my experience. But this one – there was something about this older, weary pair, their wariness and mistrust, and how that changed with time and work.

Still, there is a fundamental clumsiness to Shinn's writing, not to mention her worldbuilding, and while I'm curious about the next book, I have a feeling she's going to be one of those hit-or-miss-but-mostly-miss authors.




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Comments

[kate_nepveu]

This series also somehow mostly suppressed my critical faculties, except for the second book which I thought was fundamentally unbalanced, but yeah, somehow comforting and don't know how.

The fifth book is kind of an add-on, IIRC.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, and I tried the series because of a really charming first-person story in an anthology, which you might like: http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/2007/06/queen_in_winter.php

[lightreads]

Good to know. I read one of her previous books -- something something colony planet something genetically engineered "angels" with wings something technological regression something rapey something something -- and was underwhelmed.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, those. I read those a million years ago and didn't bother to replace them electronically when we purged our bookshelves.