F/SF

A frustrating novel in which aliens come to medieval earth. All of humanity's fate will be determined by a combination of a beauty pageant and a wrestling match. The most beautiful woman in the world and her bodyguard go to meet the aliens, with a peasant wench and her boyfriend in tow, and have various adventures along the way. Lessons are learned, hard personal truths discovered, love blossoms, etc. In the end, the wench wins the beauty pageant.

The weirdest part? This book is not humorous in any way. It was not intended to be comical, and it is not funny. It's just frustratingly bad. ( )

http://www.saltmanz.com/blog/2006/08/book-read-golden-queen.html

Saturday night (8/27/06) I finished The Golden Queen by Dave Wolverton. It's actually the first book of the Golden Queen trilogy, and though I put off reading it for a while because I don't own the next books yet, I eventually figured it would stand alone well enough by itself, so I read it.

It was decent. I won't describe the plot really, since most of it is slowly revealed as you read. I will say that it starts out in a rustic Irish setting on a backwater planet. That's where you first meet the main protagonists: Gallen O'Day, a swaggering but kindhearted bodyguard; his friend, Orick, an intelligent, talking bear; and Maggie Flynn, the girl who works at the inn and has a thing for Gallen.

It isn't long before some strangers arrive, danger breaks out, and the trio are whisked off on an adventure. Which is kind of too bad, because I think that first section of the book is my favorite part. After that, it gets pretty sci-fi-y, and though it's competently plotted and written, it just doesn't stand out as much as the initial chapters. The characters, though, are good -- especially those main three. The aforementioned strangers, Everynne and her bodyguard Veriasse, drive the plot, but never seem as fully fleshed out as Gallen and his friends. Now that I think about it, though, that's probably because (a) they're strangers to the rest of the cast for a good chunk of the story, and (b) it's really Gallen's story anyway.

Last year I read the more-recent epic fantasy series The Runelords by "David Farland", which is just Dave Wolverton's pen name. Knowing that, I could see definite similarities between the two, especially in the alien creatures: the Dronon (from Golden Queen) and Reavers (from Runelords). So far, Runelords is the better series; not surprising, as it's the more recent.

There was a slight twist at the end of Golden Queen that I kept waiting and waiting for, and when it finally popped up in the last two pages, it kind of fell flat for me. Other than that, I enjoyed the book. I'll definitely need to keep an eye out for the next two books. ( )

http://www.i-reports.info/b/B199911.html ( )