Shadow (The Trilogy, Book 1)

Rating:
Summary: Gripping, Engaging ,Challenging
Review: I highly recommend this one to people who wish to read something original. It can get confusing because your never really sure where the author is going and he purposely keeps you wondering. Sometimes funny and always entertaining the book started off a little bit simplistic and I thought I would put the book down but it sank it's teeth into me,ripped my head off,chewed on my entrails,crushed my spine,punctured my spleen and left me asking for more.

Rating:
Summary: erie & engaging
Review: This book takes place in a midieval setting, of swords and halberds and horses. The plot centers around Poldarn, a man who has amnesia. Poldarn quickly discovers that he is good at fighting, which is fortuitous because most people who recognize Poldarn are hostile. "Shadow" is a bit fragmented with Poldarn's dreams (mystic visions?) of other people's lives; and the occasional chapter from another point of view. Still, this book is well written, fast paced, unpredictable, and has an interesting idea: if you had amnesia & kept getting hints that you're past was unpleasant, would you want to know who you had been?

Rating:
Summary: Intellectual
Review: This is the type of book that requires you to delve a little deeper beyond what is given at face value.

The book starts with a man waking up laying half in and half out of a stream, with bodies scattered all around him. He has absolutely no memory of who they are, who he is, or how he got there.

On face value, the rest of the book is his story and deals with his attempts to first regain his lost memory and then his desire to keep the memories lost.

Underlying the entire series is the myth of the god in the cart which gives the book a deeper meaning.

It is a fairly intellectual book. Not everything is laid out for the reader to understand. There are a lot of inferences that need to be made. So if you are looking for something mindless - this is not the book for you.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book and recommend it highly, as well as the other two books in the series; Pattern and Memory. If you start Shadow, you have to be prepared to read the entire trilogy, because one takes you only part of the way into the depths of the myth come to life.