Pawn of Prophecy by David Eddings

[lightreads]

Pawn of Prophecy

DNF. I picked this up for the lolz, but I just can't hack it. It's not just the racism (though . . . wow) or the turgid humorlessness. What really put the nail in was a conversation where two people are circling each other, and get on the topic of magic, and the person who is a white hat explains to the reader that magic is not a question of skill, oh no. Magic is just the thing you have inside you, and to suggest that it is a thing that one can learn is nearly offensive.

And that, my friends, is a pretty good encapsulation of everything that is boring about this kind of fantasy.

This book, incidentally, is supposed to be for adults, but in a reverse of my last book, reads like YA. Pretty young YA, too.

Comments

[jadelennox]

I read this series when I was young and fantasy was shittier, and it got enough into my head that I still reread the whole series every 5 to 10 years, but I spend the entire time nowadays yelling "OH MY GOD THE SEXISM" and "OH MY GOD THE RACE ESSENTIALISM" and "OH MY GOD THESE PEOPLE ARE BAD PARENTS."

It tells you everything you need to know that David Eddings' books were almost all co-authored by his wife Leigh, starting in the early 1970s, but she didn't get any kind of credit for that until 1996. Not just "didn't get her name on the books until 1996," but "David didn't tell anyone his wife was his co-author until 10 years before she died of old age."

What a cock.

[lightreads]

I'd heard something to that effect but didn't know the details. Wow.