Rating: 
Summary: Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!
Review: I loved Ellen's *Swordspoint* and *Thomas the Rhymer*, and Delia's *The Porcelain Dove* and *Through a Brazen Mirror*--but *The Fall of the Kings* may be my favorite yet. It has all of the elegance, wit, sexiness of both authors' previous books, but *The Fall of the Kings* is about serious magic, the kind that picks you up and shakes you and doesn't care whether you survive. Legends are being brought out of the shadows into the world--and the world isn't ready to receive them. Theron Campion, spoiled and handsome child of privilege, is a descendant of the old kings. He falls into a love affair with Basil St. Cloud, a young historian at the University. But Basil has come across the lost spell-book of the last king's wizard. And when Basil deciphers the greatest of the spells, he sets loose a magic he cannot control. A magic not only in Theron's blood, but in Basil's--for if the old kings are come again, the new king must have a wizard. *The Fall of the Kings* is fantasy as it should be, a grand broad sweeping book that takes in not only the glitter and pleasures of power but its cost and pain. I look forward to the next book in this universe. (And, if this book does well, I hear rumors that there will be a next one. So buy lots of this one, y'hear?) [Full disclosure: I blurbed this book.]
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best read...
Review: I read this book before I read Swordpoint so I had nothing to compare it to when I read it. This book starts off promisingly. We are introduced to potentially interesting characters and an interesting premise. However, about half way thru the story, all the promise unravels. The potentially interesting charas are either dropped or become extremely 2D. Basil and Thereon,, the two main charas in the story trully become flat and uninteresting. By the time this story ends you are like, what? 400 + pages for this? Anyway, I went back and read Swordpoint and that book was much better...much better.
Rating:
Summary: Not the best read...
Review: I read this book before I read Swordpoint so I had nothing to compare it to when I read it. This book starts off promisingly. We are introduced to potentially interesting characters and an interesting premise. However, about half way thru the story, all the promise unravels. The potentially interesting charas are either dropped or become extremely 2D. Basil and Thereon,, the two main charas in the story trully become flat and uninteresting. By the time this story ends you are like, what? 400 + pages for this? Anyway, I went back and read Swordpoint and that book was much better...much better.
Rating: 
Summary: Worth the wait
Review: I will admit it up front: I have been a fan of the novel _Swordspoint_ for years, to the extent of buying up whatever copies I could find to pass on to anyone who seemed like they might be interested. So, naturally, I've been waiting to see a sequel for years, too. This blew me away. The City is still there, and just as vibrant and dangerous and romantic as ever -- but it's very convincingly a city that's gone through sixty years of changing fashions and circumstances. Alec and Richard and Diane are no longer there, but their presence is still felt. The old King Stag myths are beautifully incorporated into the city's history and present. I didn't fall in love with any of the new characters the way I fell in love with both Richard and Alec, but they managed to break my heart even so. And I entirely disagree with the reviewer who faulted the book for excessively numerous and graphic sex scenes. I loved each and every one of them, even the ones that horrified me. This book is a triumph of imagination and style. I can't afford to buy copies to give to all my friends, so you're going to have to buy it yourself!
Rating: 
Summary: What a huge disappointment!
Review: I've been waiting *years* for this? "Swordspoint" was stunning, beautiful, with characters who remain forever in the reader's imagination. I enjoy intrigue, drama and wonderfully written universe *but* if there aren't characters I can empathize with in the novel then it's a myopic read. There wasn't one, not *one* character with any redeaming qualities. In fact, the whole crew annoyed the hell out of me and I found myself speed reading in the hopes for a quick end. Every character was totally self-absorbed, apathetic, annoying, uninteresting.. what a disappointment. And that ending ... blech! Honestly, I tossed this dreadful novel in my library donation box. I'm sure there must be some people out there who will enjoy these types of non-characters. I didn't give a damn about them. Who would?
Rating:
Summary: Gorgeous and Elegant
Review: I've been waiting for years for a sequel to Swordspoint and was thrilled to finally read Fall of the Kings. It is as lush, gorgeous, thrilling, and witty as its predecessor, while exploring darker and richer territory. Sherman and Kushner manage to find the perfect word, the just-right phrase to catch the reader off-guard again and again. Like a fine chocolate, it is impossible to convey the sensual enjoyment, the delicious combination of bitter and sweet, the sheer delight that is Fall of the Kings. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: Holdstock, light.
Review: Kushner & Sherman really do try very hard to achieve the mythopoetic feel that imbues the work of authors like Holdstock or McKillip. Unfortunately, they don't quite succeed. Their novel ends up being a less than seamless amalgamation of homoerotic 'victorianesque' romance and raw myth.
Rating:
Summary: It's about archives!
Review: None of the other reviewers has mentioned that the main plot (or one of them) is about the fight between scholars who seek knowledge by looking in archives and measuring orbits and so on, and those who read the authorities and don't trust anyone who goes beyond them; there's also politics, and sex, and The King Must Die stuff, and magic, and nobles and scholars and revolutionaries and lecture-halls and ballrooms and sacred groves and more sex. When Basil St. Cloud, Doctor of History, asks his students to go into the University Archives to look for original sources, one student reacts: "This was scholarship with a vengeance, scholarship with teeth. This was the most important thing that had ever happened to him."
Rating: 
Summary: Oh, Blah
Review: Oh, man. It breaks my heart to be giving the novel a mediocre rating--two stars--but I can't give *The Fall of the Kings* any more, and be honest. Basically, the novel did nothing for me. The characters did nothing for me, protagonists and foils alike; the plot didn't grab; the writing didn't thrill. The reason it's heartbreaking for me to admit the novel was so uninspiring is because I love, love, love the novel FotK is sequel to--*Swordspoint*--and adore Delia Sherman's writing, so it feels almost like a betrayal to give such a disappointed review. I'm thinking it's *because* I'd adored *Swordspoint* so much that FotK is so disappointing--I read a sequel to a novel because I loved the characters in the first book, and want to see what happens to them next. I don't read a sequel to meet the children of the first novel's characters, and I don't read a novel because I care at all about the world the story takes place in. That said, once I accepted that there would be no Alec and Richard and Katherine and Diane to thrill over, I tried to get interested in and enjoy Theron, Basil, Nicholas, Sophia, and company--and couldn't. I just couldn't get interested in the love affairs, the intrigues, the scandals, the revelations, the miniature wars, any of it. I found Basil, the, ah, hero, of FotK, to be self-absorbed, annoying, and oblivious, interested only in his own affairs, taking his devoted students, his friends, heck, everything outside his narrow little life, for granted. I found Theron just as annoying, if not more so--which is a shame, because just when I was about to write him off as terminally annoying, Theron would go and do or think or say something adorable, lovable, kind, generous--likable. Then, in the next paragraph, he'd ruin the effect and do or think or say something irritating again, and I'd start forcing myself to turn the pages once more. I wish the Academic War subplot and its characters could have saved the book for me, but I found the students just as uninteresting as all the other characters, and therefore the subplot itself, though fun, had nothing to hang on, and was lost to me. It seems here that Kushner and Sherman had succumbed to Pamela Dean-itis, where the scholars and masters all around are so absorbed in the arcana of academics that I, a university student myself, find them almost caricatures, not actual people. In my experience, undergrad and grad students alike spend most of their time saying things like, "Hey! Let's watch TV! Hey! Let's go see a movie! Hey! Let's go buy useless junk! Oh my God, I can't pay my rent! Oh my God, I have no food! Oh my God, my teacher wants me to write a 20-page essay on Confucius's Superior Man--I'll kill him! I'll kill him! I'll kill him!" not spouting out esoteric quotes from ancient, crumbling sources. And while the students in FotK aren't nearly as bad as Dean's students in *Tam Lin*, and while devoting oneself to study and learning is a wonderful thing to find in a character, I still found myself searching for the aspects of their personalities that would make them sympathetic and likable and alluring to me--and found too little to sustain my enjoyment of the book. And so on, and so on, ad nauseam. Blah di blah di blah. Altogether, *The Fall of the Kings* was not a compelling read for me--I ended up skimming pages near the end, disconsolate. The characters were expertly written--but hollow. The plot was intricate--but not gripping. I ended up rejoicing at the "unhappy" moments in the novel and booing at the "happy" moments, perverse creature that I am. I'm fairly certain that everyone else who reads this book will fall in love with it, in love with Theron and Basil and so forth, adore the plot, adore the writing, adore it all and praise it mightily. As for myself, though, the thing left me cold.
Rating:
Summary: richly engrossing -- and true!
Review: Once again, Sherman and Kushner have done it -- although I'm not usually a reader of fantasy, I found myself utterly engrossed and reading way past my bedtime. It's not so much that they create (or, really, continue) a believable world, it's that with all the magic and rumor of heresy, their characters hold true to human truths, in terms of love, jealousy, and the whole range of emotions. This is a book to treasure.
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