UPDATE:
Screw this mind-fekkery. I am DUN at 73%!

FREEEDOOOM!!!!



And I am giving this book a new rating: 2 Supermassive Black Hole Stars .

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ONE STAR, cause there are no negative stars on GR

This book is one long INFO DUMP. It's so polluted with unnecessary details, it's almost unreadable. I would not have survived the printed version and I am barely surviving the audio one. It's a wonder I haven't fallen asleep at the wheel ...yet.

I am having a strong urge to DNF at 67%. So far only two things had happen: the invasion of Darion's village at 40% (-ish) and dog/griffin fight at 66%. There is no plot to speak of.

POVs jump around, at one point dissipating into nothingness and what we have on our hands is a long, boring, overly descriptive bestiary; long, boring overly descriptive history of each and every other creature we encounter; a good 10 minutes on potion making (why???); pages and pages on analyzing the poor, emoitonally abused boy's predicament ...and so on.

Will not continue with the rest of the trilogy. As a matter of fact, I don't think I will read another ML's book in the near (or not so near) future.

( )

When I first read this series I thought it was rather sweet and *understanding* and while there is a certain degree of that, this time through, Darien's introduction to life and it's knocks felt more realistic than usual with Lackey's books (within the obvious limits of course :-)).

By this point, of course, Lackey and Dixon were well up on the history of Valdemar and it was nice to see life in the country from the ordinary citizen's perspective and how they treat those who don't fit in to the niches they are assigned. ( )

While in general this book shares the faults of all of the Larry Dixon-coauthored books - clunky writing, excessive description, melodrama - I actually dislike it the least. That's not saying much, mind, but it's not totally terrible.

The look at Valdemar post-mage storms is definitely interesting, and I wish it had stayed closer to Valdemar proper instead of mostly being a Hawkbrothers book. But it's a reasonable YA adventure story, and if it drags in places at least it gets somewhere. ( )

Good story. After the grand, world-saving sweep of Storms, we get a trilogy about some ordinary people dealing with the world post-Storms - mages dealing with the change in magic, everybody dealing with the strangeness left behind by the Storms, and everybody dealing with the changes in their lives from the war with Ancar - those who didn't come back, and the changes in what can be done because of that. It's set in a tiny village on the extreme west of Valdemar, which had no healer until a mage injured in the war came to help them; also, between the damage done by the physical storms and the new threats in the Forest, their economic base has gotten a lot weaker. The hero is a boy whose parents hunted the Forest, until they didn't come back; now he's, reluctantly, apprenticed to the mage. That's the setting. Then an attack by an army of northern barbarians, the involvement of a band of Tayledras who were nearby, Darian's (the boy) blossoming, and a new arrangement between Valdemar and the Tayledras, for this far-western area. The book stops there; the story could have, but doesn't. This is my third or fourth reread of the trilogy; this part of the story is necessary foundation, but it's not as good as the next two books. So merely good, not great. ( )

I did not care for this book at all, and am not even sure I finished it. ( )