The Thief's Gamble

Rating:
Summary: This is a great book
Review: I have just finished reading "The Thief's Gamble" and I thought it was fantastic. The plot was immediately engaging and the main character, Livak, interesting. Many of the more popular fantasy novels have particularly weak female characters who tend to tag along after the action - generally they are included only as a love interest to a male hero and not as a character in their own right. Livak is a very capable hero and does not take on the more traditional role of women in fantasy. I found the magic system also easy to comprehend; McKenna never invents more abilities for her magicians to use to get out of increasingly near-catastrophic situations. This is on my top-twenty list of favourite books.

Rating:
Summary: just ok
Review: The book was fairly good, but the start of the chapters, where McKenna wrote segments of "historical documents" from the fantasy world were generally dull and unimportant. As far as I could see, only one or two of these documents had any bearing on the story whatsoever, and actually detracted from it. Also, the book was slow in many parts, making the reader bored after an hour or two. The reader only gets really acquainted with one of the numerous characters, Livak, while the others are all standard, paper-thin characters. In addition, the book had several segments in which torture or death was brutally and vividly in detail described. The revulsion brought on by these descriptions makes for a less-than-enjoyable read. Lastly, although the plot was generally interesting, McKenna elaborated on the unimportant and uninteresting facets of the plot, while leaving gaping holes in much of the imperitive information, such as the reasoning behind the Etiennes attacks-why they were gathering artifacts, and where they originally come from. However, these questions may be answered in her next novel, a sequal of sorts to this one, that deals with a different main character who appeared briefly in "Thief's Gamble", Rhysad. It would have been useful to know this information in this book, though. All in all, don't buy it if you don't have several hours to waste or while away....and skip the "historical records" at the start of each chapter.

Rating:
Summary: Intelligent entertainment.
Review: This is book one of the five book Einarinn series which I am thoroughly enjoying reading. Juliet McKenna has set this in a late Medieval world, with all the economic changes that involves - enclosures, the rise of the merchant classes, higher population and the need for expansion and colonisation. There is already trouble between some of the nations, and this serves to hide the potentially more dangerous threat posed by the mysterious, secretive Elietimm.

Livak is a thief and gambler, who is pulled into the Archimage's investigations of the threat, because her skills as a thief are needed to obtain some old family treasures, which seem to have some very special properties. After that, as they say, her life is never the same again!

I thought this book was great because it deals with real people (including the minor characters), the story is good and the background details are very well researched and thought out, but at the same time the details are not allowed to get in the way of the story.

I have given this book four stars as I think it is very good, but there are some sections, especially at the start, where the storytelling is too condensed. The basic problem is that in the opening section, too many characters are introduced at once, and you have to concentrate to keep your grip on the story. This is not a major fault and I was disappointed when the story ended, and delighted when I could read the sequel.

I thought Juliet McKenna's prose was good and the range of her vocabulary was excellent. She is now on my personal list of eagerly awaited authors which includes Terry Pratchett, Barbara Hambly, Vernor Vinge and Philip Pullman. I am not saying she is in their league right now, but I think she will be shortly.

Rating:
Summary: Calling all commas
Review: I couldn't agree more with everyone who said this book is in dire need of better editing. It would appear that the publisher had a limited amount of commas and so had to spread them out, resulting in an astonishing number of run-on sentences. For that reason, or perhaps simply because it was boring, I couldn't bring myself to finish the first 100 pages of Thief's Gamble.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but forgettable
Review: Like some of the other reviewers I found the plot and characters interesting. It was an enjoyable read. When I picked the book up about two weeks later (after I saw that the sequel was out), I couldn't remember whether I read it or not. Thumbing through I remembered that I forgot got it as soon as I read it and did not care what happened to the characters at all. I won't buy the sequel unless I find it at the thrift store for 35 cents. It was good to read while waiting for the latest of some of my favorite series to come out (Jordan, George R.R. Martin)

Rating:
Summary: An excellent new writer joins the fantasy scene.
Review: I've been reading fantasy for years, and always enjoy a good tale. I also must admit, I have kind of a weak spot for thieves and assassins; when they're well written, they're among my favorite sorts of stories.

So, when I saw this while walking through the local bookstore one day, it's probably not surprising that I grabbed it and devoured it. But that's not all...

Juliet E. McKenna has *style*. It's evident through the entire book. The characters are surprisingly real, enough so to just jump out of the page. Their emotions are well defined; they're powerful and moving, but never melodramatic. If the "good guy" dies, you cry; if the "bad guy" dies, you cheer.

Just like fantasy's supposed to be.

So I give this a high recommendation. I pre-ordered her second book (_The Swordsman's Oath_) before I had even finished reading this one, and am now looking forward to reading it, as well.

-fitheach

Rating:
Summary: Interesting
Review: The characters are interesting, the plot is interesting, the imaginary world it all happens in is interesting. Having a female protagonist who's not (gasp!) a virgin princess, well, that's pretty interesting too. And when I finished the book, I thought, hmmm, that was interesting. But not fascinating. This is the kind of stuff that's great to read when you've already read everything by George R. R. Martin and J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Jordan and Terry Brooks and Tad Williams and Terry Goodkind and you're waiting for their next books to come out. So if that's your situation, you might find this book interesting.

Rating:
Summary: Fantasy the way it should be
Review: I have never written a review before but I like this book so much that I just had to take a chance on it. I always like books with strong women protaganists but that isn't enough to keep me reading through a book. Many of the components of standard fantasy are here without being a cliche, for instance read the explanation Ms. McKenna gives in the book for why wizards don't rule the world. The characters are vivid, quirky and human. The author handles sexual encounters that turn into, if not love, certainly into affection without gush or reticence. The enemy is unfortunately one dimensional and that isn't resolved in the next book. I would like to know more about what it is in their society that makes them so brutal. The society envisioned in these books is complex enough to lend itself to several books. Let's just hope the author and publishers will recognize when it's time to quit -- But not yet, OK?

Rating:
Summary: Sophmoric tripe
Review: I am by nature a bookhound. I love books, I treasure them, I line my shelves with them and display them as though they were hard-won trophies. I never lend them out to even the most trustworthy and well-meaning of friends. Books are one of the most important things in my life, and I find it impossible to part with one after I have added it to my collection. Well, almost impossible. I did manage to find it in me to toss out Juliet McKenna's _The Thief's Gamble_, and I did so after having read only the first 150 pages. What a piece of sophmoric tripe. The characters were flatter than paving stone, the plot was idiotic (that is, when it wasn't simply non-existent), and the writing was so amazingly mediocre one wonders how this author ever landed a publishing contract from anyone more discerning than a hilly-billy highschool newspaper! I am eternally grateful that I only paid a few dollars for a discounted softcover copy of this one. I wish Ms. McKenna much luck and improvement in her future literary endeavors. Be that as it may, however, I will likely never find a place for one of her novels on my shelves.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Fantasy in Bad Prose
Review: As far as fantasy novels go, this one has a pretty good plot and development of characters. But I must agree with previous reviewers that the grammatical mistakes littered throughout the book severely detract from my enjoyment of the book. Particularly distracting is the lack of commas separating the two clauses of compound sentences.

I would buy the other books in the series, because I do like the main characters and because the plot is engaging, but I really hope that future books would be more carefully edited.