Lamentation by Ken Scholes

[lightreads]

Lamentation by Ken Scholes


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Query: how can this book be “fresh” and “groundbreaking” when for decades people have been writing fantasy novels full of dueling penises and about 10% as many vaginas, all for sale?

If you’d asked me about this book anywhere in the first two thirds, I probably would have given it a grudging two stars for occasional world building interest. This is the start of an epic fantasy series about – well, I’m not honestly sure where it’s going, but this book is about the destruction of a library-city with an ancient weapon, and the political/military/cultural aftermath. I have been known to like this sort of thing. This version, not so much. The only actual female character in this book (who is, incidentally, a red-haired courtesan-assassin, sigh) spent the first half fucking whom who whom her father told her to, then switched partners on command, at which point her father told her to get pregnant post haste, and then she found her “freedom” by breaking with her father and constructing her entire identity around, um this is awkward, marrying the guy he had told her to and getting knocked up.

The last third of the book just rescued itself with the hint that not every vagina is for sale, and also some all-too-brief suggestions that this is actually a post-apocalyptic science-fantasy as much as a traditional epic. Visitors from the moon? Which was . . . terraformed? Science and magic blended? Tell me more.

. . . If I can be bothered enough to find the sequel. We’ll see.

Dear Tor marketing: Next time just say, “it’s a book,” and save us all the trouble, okay? Okay.

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Comments

[ambyr]

Thank you for helping to convince me that I don't actually need to give this book another go, even if I do have a free copy sitting around. I got about 40 pages in the first time through and bounced, with the red-haired courtesan-assassin the final straw.

(Err, hi! Random stranger here, who finds your reviews interesting and generally in alignment with her own feelings.)

[lightreads]

Hi, and welcome!

[vito_excalibur]

Mr. E read this book! He bought it in an tiny airport bookstore because it was like the only thing that wasn't a marketing manual. He hated it SO MUCH. Occasionally we'll be wandering around doing something completely unrelated and he will just burst into RANTING OF RAGE about how stupid and awful and offensive and poorly copy-edited this book was. I am a terrible, terrible person for being glad he read it because I find this all hugely entertaining.

[lightreads]

And of course when using a booktaster, you don't have to read it yourself.

I find it telling that, before this book first came out, there was all the flailing and hyperbole. And then the sequel came out recently and . . . nothing.