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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