Rating: 
Summary: Run away. Far, far away.
Review: This book was chaotic, with charachters that
I completely could not relate with. The story
was somehow both predictable and bizarre.
It wasn't a fun story, it wasn't insightful, it wasn't coherent.
There seemed, little or no point. It built
a world of people that I didn't care to know, with motivations
that I didn't care about. The society was awkward and infeasable.
All in all, it was a torturous read.
Rating: 
Summary: The Chosen (Stone Dance of the Chameleon Trilogy, Bk 1)
Review: This book was great. I had to read every word. And I couldn't put it down. Great descriptions, and characters. Great writing! And after that ending, all I can say is, WHEN DOES THE NEXT BOOK APPEAR.I MUST HAVE IT! I MUST READ IT! I MUST!
Rating:
Summary: Strangely compelling.
Review: This is a beautifully written allegorical tale about a race of beings so rigidly governed by a set of laws and moral codes so as to rendered them emotional monsters. The Chosen is a people of great physical beauty who at the same time are capable of monstrous acts of cruelty. Theirs is a strange and alien world, a stark dichotomy of great wonders and unfathomable atrocities, where children of 'impure blood' are forbidden to even look upon their father's face. A world where incest and filicide are not only common-place but mandated by law, where betrayals, real or imagined, are swiftly met with gruesome reprisals.Mr. Pinto's prose is fluid and lyrical, conjuring in vivid details a simultaneously gorgeous but frightening world. Some readers my find the minutiae description excessly tedious. Nevertheless, I was captivated by the fascinating characters and imaginative landscape. The love between Carnelian and Obsidian is heartbreakingly poignant against a cruel and hostile background. One can only hope that the boys survive unscathed with their love in tact, given the nail biting grand-daddy of a cliff hanger ending. An agonizing and frustrating scenario that I hope will be satisfactorily resolved in the second book, Standing Dead.(...)
Rating: 
Summary: A fantasy Chung Kuo?
Review: This is one of the best new fantasy stories to appear in some time. Regardless of what the blurbs might try to make you believe, it is not, however, "literary fantasy of the highest order". It's good, but not that good. The story progresses quite linearly, starting out with the young protagonist, Carnelian, spotting an incoming ship from his island exile. Soon those aboard, three so-called Masters (or "Chosen"), have disembarked, and have called upon Carnelian's father (another Chosen) to return to the Sacred Land, Osrakum, to participate in (and, indeed, regulate) the election of a new God-Emperor. For reasons which are at that time unknown (but which turn out to be motivated by love, a rather naive premise, given the utterly grim setting against which most of the story is placed) Carnelian's father acquiesces. A vast - but (again) rather straightfoward and at times even almost dull - journey follows, as Carnelian and his father journey to Osrakum. During this sequence, which takes up most of the book, Pinto seems to delight in developing, not a plot as such, but rather a succession of horrible and at times seemingly gratuitous cruelties. Still, he does this well; slowly the "wonder" and the "majesty" of the Chosen people are brought forth, Pinto ably portraying their absolute power and moral decrepitude in equal measure. As the pages wear on, however - the book's got about 700 of them - you're ground down by this repetition of well-drawn but unvarying images, which amount, all told, to something of an indefinate mass of hierarchic (vaguely Chinese) oppression. Moreover, although the writing is admittedly well-realised, much of it ultimately amounts to little more than superficial background. In can be pointed out that, in the end, the story boils down to a quite simple struggle with regard to the votes cast in the election of the new Emperor, whilst, at the same time, an incongruous and rather absurd love affair between Carnelian and the Emperor-elect is thrown in for good measure. There's very little in this outcome which surprises or engages; Pinto, perhaps realising this, then abruptly sets out to give the book a totally inappropriate "cliff-hanger" of an ending which does much more harm than good. This is a good book, better than 90% of the fantasy novels you'll find this year. But it isn't great, and perhaps Pinto still has a bit to learn. If you're looking from something new, buy it by all means, but if you're new to this genre, you'd do better getting anything from Guy Gavriel Kay, Patricia McKillip, or Stephen Donaldson (to name just three). I've one other quip to make: throughout the story, Pinto manages time and again to describe his scenes in an irritatingly oblique fashion, causing you to to do double-takes just about every ten pages or so. That's all very well for those writers whose content is essentially dominated by their style (such as Paul Hazel), but Pinto is a long way off from emulating (and, I would assume, from wishing to emulate) such writers.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange coming of age worldbuilding attempt.
Review: This is one of the weirder novels I've read recently and I'd have to say its attempt to build a world up from scratch is a nice try but between writing style and plot holes comes up short. Give Pinto credit for trying to break out of formulaic fantasy strictures. This is not your average world, with a brutal caste system, some real funky power structures and shows some real thought in its building (the opening poem made me wonder if he was trying to openly imitate Tolkien). The problem is his writing style flounders the attempt. The descriptions are long but choppy, single sentence statements of fact rather than painting a mosaic in the reader's mind. The other problem is the plot falls prey to the worldbuilding. In trying to walk his coming of age character through this world that he's never been through, he gets caught up in 50 page distractions where he's both explaining the social order and trying to paint a tapestry of a huge world. Given the basis of the social order -- the Chosen holding some power that allows them to run roughshod on everyone else -- is never really explained and certainly not supported by what he gives you (e.g. is there some mystic army that they wield through the Wise or are they longer lived than their slaves -- it certainly doesn't look like it!), between the combination of the choppy writing and constantly trying to figure out how the heck the world actually works it's quite easy to get lost very quickly. The section on escaping the port city was one where I frankly had to reread it several times to even have a clue what was going on. Finally, the ending is tailor made for a sequel and quite contrived -- the 8 chapters before it don't even point towards the possiblility -- and leaves the reader wondering if we get to do it all over again with the world exploration next novel. Still, there's some promise here. Maybe a good set of editors can do something with the next book although I probably won't buy it.
Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect!
Review: This is the kind of book that makes you want to worship the writer. How does Ricardo Pinto take fantasy, with all its tired, old devices and conceits, and turn it into something so lovely that it defies description? THE CHOSEN is by far the best book I've read in over a year. If you like Gene Wolfe's Urth cycle, Mervyn Peake, Paul McAuley's Confluence series, and other such stuff, you'll adore this one. I think the cultural influences Pinto weaves in are Japanese, Mayan, and Egyptian. The elaborate rituals and ornate settings are hypnotically described, and the characters are flawless. My only complaint is the terrifying ending. I am obsessed! I need to know what happens!
Rating:
Summary: Dark, sinister, and a little bit spooky.
Review: This novel is full of political intrigue, dark imagery, and expression of the dark side of human nature. It begins as the "classic journey tale" but develops into a complexity of themes centered around the integration of "Carnie" into the society that he had grown up apart from due to his father's exile. Carnie quickly learns that he is a privileged member of a society and political infrastructure that he does not understand, nor does he really wish to understand it because it undermines the image of "self" he thought he possessed. The journey stuff at the beginning was a bit too much at times, but it sets up some very important themes and imagery that figures on later in the book. Definitely a good book. Excellent first effort. Not for those who think the world is a shiney, happy, place.
Rating:
Summary: The Chosen by R. Pinto
Review: Thoroughly enjoyed the book. The same-sex parts of it surprised me, but the relationship between Carnelian and Osidian did not detract from the book. I was left wondering how (if) they will be saved and what will happen to Lord Suth, Carnelian's father. The prose is poetic. This book hooked me word for word, and few books have that capacity. Will be reading its successor as soon as it is available. J.G.
Rating:
Summary: What a yawner...
Review: Very well written but it's all descriptive. The story moves at snails pace but it's very well visualized. I can find a better 624 pages worth of my life to spend on than this yawner. By the way I would like my money back.
Rating:
Summary: Can hardly wait to read the next book
Review: When I bought the book a few months ago, I must say that the number of pages alone was enough to make me take a deep breath before starting to read it. A few chapters into the book I started to feel that the action was going a bit too slow and that too much effort was being put into description, which was a bit boring at times. Still, all that is necessary to be able to fully understand, appreciate and most of all FEEL the things that are to come.
The moment things really start to happen I found it almost impossible to put the book down.
A brilliant first book by an author I'll be following closely from now on.
|
