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Krondor the Betrayal: : Book One of the Riftwar Legacy

Krondor the Betrayal: : Book One of the Riftwar Legacy

List Price: $7.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Never base a novel on a game!
Review: I'm sorry to say that I was not impressed withe Feist's latest addition to the tales of Midkemia. I have been an avid follower of his work ever since the Magician, but this book really leaves me cold. Where is the character development? Why has he resorted to reworking an old storyline in such a labored way? The biggest worry is that Betrayal is described as Book 1 of a series, please Mr Feist quit while you're ahead. I don't wish to be overly critical of a man who is a very accomplished author, but I get the distinct impression that this book was more inspired by marketing strategy rather than literary creativity.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Enjoyable but thin
Review: I have read all of Raymond Feist's books, and thought Betrayal at Krondor was one of the best computer games I have ever played. Therefore, it was a very pleasant shock to find this book in the store. I am very pleased I bought the book, and enjoyed reading it, but the differences from Feist's books are very clear. What surprised me most is the writing style: Feist is a very elegant and mature writer, with a good sense of language and flow, and natural diction. The writing in this book was primitive compared to his usual style -- simple sentences, choppy transitions, limited vocabulary. This sense of reading a different author was compounded by almost complete lack of emotion or character development -- at most, Feist would say "Locklear was angry" rather than putting you inside Locklear's feelings. For those of us who are happy to return to Midkemia and follow the plot, and can fill in the characters from his other books, it was great fun. No one should make this the first Midkemia book they read.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Talk about great!!!! #1
Review: This is just a great book, like the game called 'krondor the betrayal',I liked it and I am very pleased with his work. I am now wondering what his next book about the midkemian world is. What ever it is I will get it,because I know he will write a superbe book. And everybody out there you should start from the begining, for I was totaly hooked when I started reading the book,and I know you will too. Keep it up feist.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: A dissapointing adaptation
Review: Unlike previous novels, this attempt by Fiest seemed more a story outline than a well thought-out book. The characters are quickly thrown together without much explanation, their actions and motivations often illogical, and the narrative often curt and uninteresting. Unlike Fiest's other novels that have engaging characters and novel plot twists, this attempt seemed much more like the cookie cutter yarns writers like Jordan or Brooks produce. True, this was an adaptation of a computer game. However, in the future, if Fiest intends to adapt more novels from his gaming line, I suggest he either write better computer game outlines or abandon adaptations in lieu of well written stories.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A book about a computer game???
Review: I did not know that Mr. Feist wrote this book until I saw it by chance in a bookstore in the US during my holidays there. I immediately bought it as I simply love all his Midkemia-books so far and had hoped for a new series. I read this book on the plane and finished it at home the day after. I enjoyed it although I must say, that you can notice without any problems that the plot origins from a computer game. You have a problem and you have to solve it with several possible choices to choose from. I was a bit disappointed about that and I hope the following books will improve in this aspect. But overall this book is still worth reading!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good but not great. Fiest has done better
Review: Raymond Feist is my favorite aurthor and I judge all other books on the "Magician Apprentice" and "Magician Master" this book just doesnt compare. "Krondor the Betrayal" just was not realistic in the manner which the characters in the book gained their power for example one part that really disolusioned me was when Pug and Owyn gathered magic as though it was a crop this was just too much like a video game. I know that it was based on the game which is why i gave it three stars because what it lost literarily it gained through its honesty to the game. All and all the plot was entertaing and Owyn is a loveable charecter though at times he seemed like Pug Light. I recommend this book only to people who have read Feist before because I dont want new Feist readers to give up thinking that this is the best Feist can write. Of all Fiests book this is the least entertaining but entertaining none the less.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A good yarn that reads like a computer game!
Review: I must say straight away that I have not played the computer game, but I have read all the previous books set in this world. I was enthusiastic when I saw that the book was a development on Feist's earlier books but I found that, while I enjoyed the book, it is not of the same richness as his earlier books. Krondor does tend to read like a computer game scenario - get a group of characters together in the first 20 pages, give them a task, some gold and off they go. A few pages later they run into someone who sets them off on the next task. The episodic feel tends to distract from the development of the main plot. There is not a lot of character development while they're all shuffled around the map - which is a shame because some old favorites like Pug, Martin, and Jimmy the Hand all appear. This book follows on ten years after Darkness at Sethanon and I was disappointed when the culmination of this series of adventures turned out to be a bit too predictable and sketchily handled. All in all, I was left with the impression that this book was not given the attention it needed to bring it up to the standards of the previous volumes but it was still an enjoyable read.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not for those new to Feist, not for all Feist fans either
Review: Although I have never played the role playing game the book was based, I found myself playing it at many points in this book. The book definitely reflects its game.
However, it's not a bad read for Feist fans because the already present rich history and backdrop of Midkemia and the characters of Jimmy and Pug lend the book the character it lacks as a stand-alone (which is what makes it not so good a read for those new to Feist).
It could have used more imagination. Gorath's character was the best new thing in this book.

3/5 stars for effort and Gorath.

-Huge Feist fan

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: What is this-Diablo II?
Review: at the cash register.

I've read some of the other reviews, and it sounds like Feist is usually well regarded. Well, I guess I'll never find out, not after reading this awful book.

Formulaic, cliche, and mind numbingly convenient. In the end, I pressed on out of some morbid curiosity. This is a great example of how not to write a book.

The characters are all flat. I really got the sense that the author threw this together in a couple of weeks.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not up to the standard Feist set...
Review: Book 1 of the Riftwar Legacy

Originally this book was a computer game, but Raymond Feist decided that he wanted to make a novel about it. He took the core story, eliminated some of the sillier side quests that RPGs are known for and wrote the book. The book has turned out to be the weakest in the world of the Riftwar. The characters, including those that were favorites and well known from the Riftwar Saga, just feel to be flat and not nearly as interesting as they were in the earlier novels. The time frame of this book comes about ten years after A Darkness at Sethanon (Princess Anita is pregnant with Nicholas) and several years before A Prince of the Blood.

Krondor: The Betrayal introduces two new characters that will serve as the protagonists: Owyn, a magician and Gorath, a Dark Elf. We also get to revisit Locklear, Jimmy, Pug, and Arutha and other minor characters who appear in the Riftwar Saga. Locklear is on patrol in the Northern lands of the Kingdom and comes across a band of moredhel chasing someone. Upon being rescued, that someone turns out to be Gorath, a moredhel himself. He has an urgent message for Prince Arutha: Murmandamus lives! Murmandamus was the big bad in A Darkness at Sethanon and was killed at that city. The threat, rumor, risk that he might be alive, or that the moredhel could believe that, is cause for alarm and Arutha immediately sends Jimmy and Locklear (with Owyn and Gorath) to investigate while Arutha marshals the armies.

This is a book filled with action and not so much with character development or even much characterization. I can imagine that this book would only appeal to fans of the Riftwar Saga as we get to see favorite characters in the prime of their lives (and still alive, for some of them). The book still reads like a video game and you are going from place to place with lots of small battles and several bigger ones and as a whole, this was a much weaker offering by Raymond Feist. I blame this on the fact that he is converting a game to a book and it just didn???t work extremely well. I enjoyed getting to see my favorite characters again, but they didn???t feel as real or as well drawn as they are in other novels.


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