Home :: Books :: Science Fiction & Fantasy  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes
Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy

Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
The Burning Stone

The Burning Stone

List Price: $7.99
Your Price: $7.19
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 2 3 4 5 6 >>

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Fantastic
Review: Unlike Prince of Dogs, this book is much more focused on the plot line. It is easily possible to envision the stubborn, lustful Hugh and caring but strong Prince Sanglant who lived under the shame of exile by his father, King Henry. This book does not concentrate as much on the wars and battles at hand as much as revealing just enough informtion on our beloved characters' heritage to tantalize the reader into a state of addiction.

My Gripes inlude the long and unnecessary desription of the events in Vernia, a secret place where Liath's long lost mother had taken her.

Admirations: The plotline is much more focused and it slowly introduces the reader to the final battle between forces of higher spheres and humans. In a way this book serves as the rising action, which will inevitably end in the end with a fantastic conclusion.

Kate Elliots unimaginable talent is again displayed as she further solidifies her own world where lust and death is only a portion of daily life.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: The Burning Stone
Review: The book is good, but at times it drags. There are points where I would have preferred more information and points where you just want here to get on with it. So far the whole mess with the Eika seems pointless, except to give them someone other than themselves to fight with. She gives just enought hints and clues to interest most people, but the true fantasy reader will find her frustrating to some degree. I would recommend the book, but I would be sure to warn people that it isn't the best work I have seen.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Eight Hundred Pages Later...
Review: I have serious reasons for slapping a 2-star on this review, but I'm sorry to do it. I want to be positive about this endless opus, and I just can't do it. Kate Elliott wants to write a major novel. She has forgotten what most major novelists bear in mind: finish the story!

There is no point in summarizing, or trying to, 800+ pages and (at a quick mental count) six plot lines. 1000 words isn't enough room, and by the time the summary was finished, there would have been butchery done.

There is too much underbrush here. There are too many plots. Even David Brin remembers that more than four plots (sub or otherwise) are quite enough. At a certain point, you can't remember - or care! - who is doing what or why one person is doing this or that. Elliott, every once in a while, has to take time out of the plot and summarize. This is tiresome.

It's much too late to advise her, but an editor, or her reading group, ought to have urged her to drop a few of her plot-lines. There is no point in saying that she's trying to reflect real life, where everything is complicated. The reader ceases to care.

I began this, the third book in what I hoped was a trilogy (and let's not go into how tired I am of 2400-page trilogies), in the patient expectation of a resolution. At four hundred pages, I was more than ready for the end. I was tired of everyone. I took a deep breath, polished my disbelief suspenders, refreshed my reader's good will, and plunged forward, thinking "One last push, and we're done!"

Well, no.

Around page six hundred, I began to suspect, with a sort of weary horror, that Elliott wasn't done.

Now, I waited for this one in paper. The next one won't get bought, even in paper, because I'm sick to death of this story.

Kate Elliott isn't a bad writer. In fact, I think she's got potential. But this Crown of Stars thing is getting annoying, and I refuse to reward her. I don't know if the problem is that she doesn't know where she's going, or has gotten bogged down in way too many sub-plots, or (worst thought) she thinks this story deserves 3200 pages. It doesn't.

Don't buy this, don't read it. Maybe at some point Kate Elliott will take an axe to the undergrowth and produce an actual, readable novel. Buy that, not these.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I just love this series!
Review: I got hooked on this series. King's Dragon suprised me, i didn't think I would like it, then I read The Prince of Dogs. Loved that too, but I found this book to be sort of slow. Not much happens, I know she is setting up for the next book Child of the Flames so I'm really looking forward to it. Read this because it will be really important to the series but wait until the next book is out.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: I love this series!
Review: I think this is a wonderful series for any fantasy reader to collect. King's Dragon and then The Prince of Dogs got me hooked, but i found this one to be a little slower. It's still wonderful, the first two were just more interesting. I can't wait for Child of Flames to come out, this book is totally setting up for that one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great fantasy series!
Review: I loved this book and the two books before it. I can't wait until her fourth book in this epic series is published. If you are an avid fantasy reader then this is the series to read!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not as good as the other two
Review: This book is not given five stars because it doesn't really go anywhere...sure there is action, but it's long and dragged out, and the whole 816 pages of it is very slow, only filling a gap between the last book and soon the next. I thought it didn't concentrate as much as I wanted on the characters I fell in love with in the first two books, and there is really no problem they get anywhere near solving. The story is pretty good, but I liked the other two better--I've always liked Kate Elliott's style and I can't wait to read the next one!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Ooops, she did it again...
Review: This is not one of my favorite series. The female lead is a wet, soppy dishrag of a character, quite understandably traumatized by a villain the author seems unwilling to kill off. The soppy Lois Lane...I mean, Liath gets no closer to her goal of figuring out what the heck is going on, nor does she get a life. Alain discovers he is NOT in fact in any way related to the old Duke who named him as heir--as a result, he gets booted out, despite natural talent, and a sort of mindlink to Stronghand, King of the Mutant Teenage Dragon Vikings (well, that's what they looked like) Stronghand himself is learning the benefits of sneakiness and...errr...husbandry.

Kate Elliot's books are painfully realistic (from a cultural point of view) medieval fantasy...with many of the uglier laws and practices of that era sadly in force. As a sort of extremely alternate-reality medieval fantasy, it's fascinating--you can clearly see all the real-world parallells--plot wise, it's murky, messy, and often painful to read.

Don't expect any thing like the idealized, and romantic Deryni novels when you read this book,or any of the others in the series.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: How long will this go on?
Review: When I first read King's Dragon I found this series rather harsh but, stuck in there out of sheer morbid curiosity, Prince of Dogs was better than the first and I had high hopes for The Burning Stone. However I find the cast of characters difficult to keep up with,the action scenes choppy, and the plot thin as gauze. The main heroine (if you can call her that) bounces around more than a rubber ball in this book and you aren't sure if you should be rooting for or against her. I think Kate should cut down on the number of characters and the number pages. I'm beginninng to think the bad guys should blow up this world.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: This doesn't even deserve a star.
Review: This was obne of the worst books I have ever read in my entire life. I liked the first two, but the third one didn't even have a plot. I don't understand how you could right that many pages with none of it relating to the other. I only put a star on because they don't have none at all.


<< 1 2 3 4 5 6 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates