Rating: 
Summary: The Power and the Glory
Review: I eagerly awaited the arrival of this latest installment and was not disappointed at all! Janny Wurts' books are complex, fun, serious, full of the adventure and magic that characterize the genre. If that were ALL her books contained, I wouldn't bother to buy them! Luckily for me her books have a powerful sense of beauty, a deep conviction of the ways of worlds and peoples, and a truthfulness with tragedy that will no doubt annoy the shallow reader. For those of us who are willing, however, the journey with Ms. Wurts is to be taken with a deep breath of anticipation, a gleeful grin and a headfirst dive into wonder!
Rating:
Summary: Another in a magnificant series
Review: I have been suprised to see the number of non-positive reviews of this book. I received my copy and devoured it in a day. Janny's characterization and storytelling pulled me into the story like an old friend. For those who missed the relentless action of the first two novels, I would advise them to think again. If these stories contained only action, I would think the characters less appealing and believeable, since they would all have collapsed in complete mental breakdowns as a result of their frenetic life-styles. Yes, the 12 year jump fazed me, but I understood the reasoning behind it. Previously, time passed mostly in between books, so it was a bit jarring, but not unpleasant, since waiting for Kevor and Fionn to grow up would have taken forever! Trust that the author knows what they're doing. As for the "Why hasn't this ended in 5 volumes," she didn't say it would. She said there were 5 story arcs. And she did write to the fans to apologise for the necessary splitting of this arc into three. How many authors do that? She's not trying to spin us out for as much as we'll give, like some <Anne MCCaffery comes to mind..>. I'm just along for the ride..it's her story, and my distinct honor to watch it develop. ()
Rating: 
Summary: Grand Conspiracy: Wars of Light and Shadow
Review: I have, as many of the other reviewers, read the entire series, as well as all the other works by Janny Wurts. I have overall enjoyed every bit of her work. I do agree that this last book dragged on far more than the others, and I felt anxious to have it over with or for something to happen. I must confess that I skipped ahead to the end and read the end a little over half way through the book. I NEVER do this, and I am an avid fantasy series reader. It just speaks for how I found things to drag. Overall, I liked the book. I am nauseated by Lysaer's treatment of his wives and find it difficult/irritating to read those parts. I am not totally comfortable with absolutely hating Lysaer and "adoring" Arithon. It just doesn't seem like the differences should be so disparate. It makes it all seem so unrealistic (as if fantasy is "realistic"!). I really don't want to wait for the next book very long. Hopefully she (Ms. Wurts)will feel compelled to bring us a reprieve quickly to make up for the unresolved desire for some "meat". Several reviewers did not like the flowery and complex language. I personally like the challenge of more sophisticated fantasy. I like believing that some fantasy books are written for "grown up" readers who have good vocabularies (and good dictionaries!)
Rating: 
Summary: Overworked.
Review: I too had desperately waited for this novel. While some important events transpire, I was disappointed at how many pages it takes for so few of them to occur. Some character development occurs, but I had to refer to the glossary several times to remember who all the characters are-- it's been that long! I do not regret buying the book, but only because I own all of the others in the series. I hope that Ms. Wurts gets some good refreshing time before she writes the next book.
Rating:
Summary: Janny Wurts on the decline.
Review: I'm a big fan of Janny Wurts since her Empire trilogy and I swallowed the first novels of this series in rapid succession so far. The tale of Arithon and Lysaer and the Curse of the Mistwraith that has doomed the half-brothers to eternal enmity proceeds after an interlude of several years. During this time Arithon has spent years overseas in the search of the lost Paravians while Lysaer has once again increased his political machinations to consolidate his righteous crusade against his hated brother. The relative stagnation of the feud is interrupted when Morriel, leader of the Koriani witches, employs the full power of her magic order to finally bring down Arithon.Wurts' major strengths that I appreciated so far are her ability to spin complex and intruiging plots containing elements of high fantasy, politics and passionate affairs of the heart. And a willingness to let her main protagonists suffer and her knack in exploiting these small tragedies to further raise the stakes in the story itself while enhancing the emotional attachment of the reader to the protagonists. Alas Wurts has reached a level where she simply starts to wear out these talents. Her style of narration in Grand Conspiracy is full of heavy flowery phrases that it just gets annoying. She looses herself in the complexity of her plot, wanting to follow too many individual yet somehow linked story lines with the same intensity (i.e. chars like Jieret, Lirenda and other secondary protagonists). Also I think that she exaggerates in showing the falseness of Lysaer's crusade and the way he and his minions use various instruments (one being the same black art of spell casting that Lysaer is accusing Arithon of abusing) becomes rather stereotype. But the most annoying factor has become the level of whining and self-pity shown not only by Arithon, something we're used by now, but also a large scale of other characters (Elaira, Jieret, Fionn Areth and even to some degree the Fellowship Sorcerers). The biggest disappointment is Elaira, who still fails to win free from the hold of her Koriani sisters on her life and soul. Instead we get to see her once again exchange "heartbreaking" scenes of longing and dispair and of course lots of forgiveness between her and her lover Arithon. Where has the innovative passion gone from Ships of Merior when Elaira and Arithon discover their love during a combined magical effort to heal a fatally wounded civilian (a scene which will probably be among my all time favorite episodes in fantasy/sci-fi literature). Of course Grand Conspiracy has still its strengths. Wurts' application of various types of magic and the descriptions of spell casting as a delicte art are first class. And the long awaited appearance of Davien the Betrayer occurrs with such a careful and elaborately carved introduction that I'm really eager for more of Davien in the next sequels. But as a conclusion these few highlights aren't enough to make up for many disappointments in the overall progress of this otherwise great fantasy series.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant!
Review: I, like so many other Wurts' fans, waited and longed for this book to appear. When it finally did, I was ecstatic, and reading it , I was not let down in the slightest. It is an essential installment in the saga. I would also like to remind people that, although Janny Wurts did promise a total of five books, "Ships of Merior" and "Warhost of Vastmark" were to have been published in one volume, ecept it was too big. The five books, therefore, will be concluded in the next one, which I am awaiting with the utmost impatience after this wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: Still waiting
Review: I, too, waitied for this book for a long time. I think that the Mistwraith series (inc this 2nd cycle) has been the been the greatest story in contemporary fantasy, and therefore worth a read. This, however, is the slowest of the series so far, and some of it struck me as filler before [what we have been promised] the final volume. If you enjoy fantasy, you've GOT to read the series so you can't escape this one, but as always I wish I'd waited for the writing to be completed so I could read it all in the one hit. I only wish Ms Wurtz's world in this part of the series had the clarity and detail of the novels of the first cycle. It becomes easy to forget that the whole issue is that this is a world filled to the brim with magic and leashed power. In that, a disappointment because this author has her own magic with words. Now that all of the loose ends have been reexposed for the final novel maybe we can go on?
Rating:
Summary: For the want of an editor...
Review: In some ways, Wurts' writing is excellent. She has created a reasonably well-drawn world, with a very original plot and characters. She makes an effort to write in an artistic, poetic way... and therein lies a problem. Apparently, nobody's ever told her that one should show readers things rather than telling them. Thus, every tiny detail of the book is explained over and over, exhaustively. Why use one sentence where three will do? Why allow inference when you can bludgeon your readers with words? Furthermore, her efforts at poetic writing sometimes trip her up. She occasionally uses words with no apparent understanding of their definitions, and spouts flowery phrases which, examined closely, make no sense. My favorite was "permafrost clarity". Think about that one for a minute... Add to this a plot with various holes and exceedingly slow action, much slower than in the previous books, which were not exactly fast-moving. On the plus side, the obnoxious Dakar does not appear until halfway through the book, and Arithon's endless whining seems somewhat curbed. One factor that I found troubling was the all-knowing, all-benevolent, all-male Fellowship Sorcerers... as compared to those nasty meddling female Koriani witches. If you're already immersed in the series, you'll read this anyway, and probably enjoy it to some extent. If not, you would want to start with the first book in any case... but don't say I didn't warn you.
Rating:
Summary: A very pleasing coninuation of my favourite series!
Review: In this novel, we continue tracking our favourite prince-cum-mage-cum-pariah, Arithon s'Ffalenn, in his quest to keep away from his half brother, the wonderfully charming and handsome statesman-psycho, Lysaer s'Illesid. The book starts off with Elaira being forced into participate in another one the Koriani's diabolical plans, designed to snare Arithon for their own; the "Grand Conspiracy" that the book is titled for, probably. The book is an introduction for a lot of new settings, I think; a few new major characters are introduced, and by the time the book ends, twenty years have spanned. This is actually the reason why I gave this book four stars instead of five, even though it still has it's graceful prose and it continues with the series' wonderful plot. The transition is made very awkwardly; through one chapter, actually, and suddenly Arithon and Lysaer aren't in their late twenties anymore; their in their late fourties (however apparently they still look the same). Considering that the series has a tendency to portray weeks at a time with intense detail, twenty years fitting into one chapter is a little weird. But, honestly, it doesn't really matter in the end; we get the impression that the twenty years were a lull anyway. All in all this book is a great continuation of a wonderful series. If you've been following the series, get this; if you haven't start with The Curse of the Mistwraith. For me this was a real page turner; but the characters were what kept me curious; not the plot.
Rating:
Summary: Stiff, difficult reading
Review: Janny Wurts is a superb artist. I have read all of her books to date, and to my great disappointment find this book overworked, humorless and incessantly gloomy. The themes are well plotted and could be vastly more interesting if they went somewhere. It seemed as if one were reading a diary. The characters' motives except for the the Fellowship Sorcerers have become that of unremitting negativity. The analogies and grandiose adjectives at times border on the ridiculous. Examples: p. 128: "jewels like points of ice hung on a nerveless wax statue"; p.150: "sweat bathed his forehead in sliding drops, until his skin glistened like a burst egg white", etc. The stilted conversations by and between characters is unrealistic. This is so sad. I want to read the story of these characters. I want to care about them. I want to see movement toward resolution of their problems. Alas.
|
