PhoenixFalls - , reviewed on 8/11/2010 + 185 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 4

If I had read just the last 50 pages of this novel I would have been quite impressed. They are wonderfully moving, reminiscent (in a good way) of the section in The Return of the King before the hobbits head back to the Shire.

Unfortunately, those last 50 pages are not earned by the 540 pages before. The first 540 pages were really quite bad -- not because Wurts is a poor writer, but because she is a poor storyteller. The sentence-by-sentence writing is actually quite good -- there was some beautiful imagery sprinkled throughout the novel. But while each sentence was crafted well, somehow the story never gelled. I didn't believe the characters. I didn't believe the world. I *really* didn't believe the politics. And in every single scene I wanted to be in some other scene -- she always seemed to be moving away from the action instead of towards it.

There were more little quirks of her storytelling that annoyed me than I can count -- she summed up important scenes rather than showing them; she used peoples' titles for no reason I could come up with but the fact that she had already used their name in the same paragraph; she was far more in love with her characters than I was; etc. And the biggest failing -- though many published (best-selling even!) writers fail at this one, so maybe it doesn't bother others as much as it does me -- all of the conflict in the novel rested on characters refusing to tell each other anything. If the mages and the two leads had simply sat down together on page 100 and pooled their information, all the conflict would have been brought to a head where it could be dealt with summarily. Of course, then there would be no epic door-stopper fantasy novel.

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