The Thief's Gamble

Rating:
Summary: An excellent read- well paced and entertaining to the end
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed "The Thief's Gamble". It was a spur of the moment buy and I wasn't expecting much from an author I'd never heard of. The story transitioned nicely between first person narration of the main character and narrative of the rest of the "supporting" players.

The book moved along at a steady pace from start to finish, gradually building momentum that kept me reading until the wee hours of the morning.

I'm very much looking forward to the next book!

Rating:
Summary: "The Thief's Gamble" was excellent.
Review: I read a lot of books and this was one of the best. McKenna's fantasy world is wonderful. It may have things like wizards and the likes but the way she portrays everything is spactacular, very original.

McKenna's leading character, Livak, is a wounderful example of a female "hero" or "heroin" as I should say. A well rounded character is very hard to achive and I feel that McKenna did an extrodinary job at it. The supporting characters were also good but more female ones were needed considering that the main character was female.

The book also has an extremly good storyline and McKenna cleaned up the lose ends that most books leave you to wonder about. I feel this is a good thing because it makes the book a complete book and not one that relies on following books to tell what happened.

McKenna you are a very good writer and keep the books coming.

I will be looking for another book about Einarinn because the book did say it was "The First Tale of Einarinn"

I recomend this book to anyone that like to read well constructed books with a dynamic storyline.

The book was excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Promising premise... never delivered
Review: On paper, Juliet McKenna's debut looks promising. Interesting (if not particularly unique) characters, an interesting magical premise (lost magic against which "modern" wizards have little defense), and a conflict with potential global implications. In the hands of a more skilled author, "The Thief's Gamble" could have been stellar.

Unfortunately, McKenna is not a particularly good writer. Beyond just the poor rhythm and mediocre word choice, she splits the narration between Livak's first person viewpoint and a limited omniscient viewpoint for a half-dozen other minor characters. Just when you're able to get into the groove of Livak's (often witty) narrative, you're jolted into the heads of not-very-interesting wizards talking about not particularly interesting stuff.

The characters themselves, while they have promise, never truly develop into more than two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. Actually, Livak and Ryshak remind me quite a bit of every elven-thief and sworn-swordsman pairing in the Shadowrun and Dungeons & Dragons games I used to sit in on with my high school boyfriend's buddies. The only halfway interesting character, the wizard Otrick, gets very little more treatment than a few choice witticisms.

I could have overlooked all of this, based on the strength of the premise, if it ever had've been delivered. The pacing is slow until the end (where it felt rushed) and the story itself lacks any real tension, any sense that there are consequences for failure. Even though this was set up as a "low quest"- a thief's gamble-I never felt like the characters were in any real danger... and therefore, I cared very little about what happened to them.

Bottom line: it's not the worst thing you can spend your time reading, but there are better alternatives. If you must have lightweight (and better written) prose with interesting magic, try Mercedes Lackey. If it's the first person narrative and sexually-liberated female you enjoy, you can do no better than Jacqueline Carey's erotic "Kushiel's Legacy" trilogy (adults only!). And for heroic fantasy with varying degrees of romance and strong, three-dimensional characters, pick up Elizabeth Haydon's "Symphony of Ages" trilogy or Laura Resnick's excellent "In Legend Born" and "In Fire Forged."

I may buy the second book in McKenna's series, but only in the hopes she has availed herself of a good editor.

Rating:
Summary: WOW.
Review: I mean it, WOW. I love fantasy books, I love the genre so much, but this made me realize why people say that we're stupid and just wasting our time with poorly written swill. It sounded good, it really did, but the writing was bad to the point of, oh, the baby-sitter club books my little sister read when she was 8. Maybe the characters were well developed, maybe the plot was unique and fresh, problem was, I couldn't get there, the first chapter was that BAD. You want decent fantasy, go read Terry Pratchett or Janny Wurts, Raymond Feist, or David Eddings, Robin Hobb is good too. Don't waste your time with this.

Rating:
Summary: horriable
Review: The Thief's Gamble is the first novel of the Einarinn series. Hundreds of years ago, the Tormalian Empire ruled much of the land east of the Great Forest. All the lands west of the Great Forest were claimed by the Kingdom of Solura. In the Great Forest itself lived the Forest Folk, whose ministrels often wandered all through the known world. The world was stable, with few wars, until Nemith the Reckless attacked the Mountain Men of Gidestan to obtain the gold and silver believed to be plentiful there. Then the colony in Kel Ar'Ayen, the new land across the sea, was attacked by strangers. Suddenly, the Tormalian Empire collapsed in confusion and chaos.

With the empire went its primary form of magic. Spells that had worked for generations suddenly failed. Priests and wizards were blamed for these failures, persecuted, and killed. Trydek, a tutor of a differing, and minor, form of magic based on the elements and available only to those born with the mage talent, gathered such mageborn as he could and fled to the island of Hadrumal. From these refugees developed the now prevalent, and powerful, elemental magic.

In this novel, Livak is the by-blow of a Forest Folk ministel and her mother, and grandmother, have never let her forget her origins. She ran away from her home in Vanam after one too many rounds of critical words from her mother. Penniless and desperate for food and shelter, she decided to become a prostitute, but her first client was more interested in torture than sex. Fortunately, she won the fight and escaped with only a few cuts and bruises. Immediately thereafter, she mugged her first victim in a career of professional thievery and personal gambling. She has since gained a number of larcenous friends throughout the region.

While waiting for her partner, Halice, Livak runs short of funds, so she burgles a house which she soon recognizes as the location of her close brush with torture and death ten years before. After fantasies of stealing all its valuable contents, she limits herself to an antique tankard. She tries to sell it to Darni, a supposed merchant buying antiquities, but he recognizes the item and accuses her of stealing it. Luckily, he wants to use her to steal other articles, so she joins Darni, Geris, a scholar, and Shivvalan, a wizard, in their pursuit of antiquites. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape is thwarted by Shiv's magic, she pledges not to try again and she is told that the group are buying, or stealing, these items for the Archmage, Planir, to re-discover the lost magics of the defunct Tormalian Empire.

Apparently some objects retain information about their former owners which manifest as dreams to the current possessors. The mages have developed ways to bring out such information and are learning much more about the Empire. However, they are concentrating primarily on ancient items which may have been owned by Imperial wizards. They have discovered enough to classify the lost form of magic as aetheric -- which one scholar explains means "thin air" -- rather than elemental.

As Livak and the Archmage's agents progress in their search, they are attacked by short, blonde men using some kind of unknown magic. Between Darni's vicious swordwork and Shiv's magic, with some help from Geris and Livak, they fight off the attackers, but find little of interest on the bodies. Although Darni supposes that they are just bandits, Livak is unconvinced, for blondes are rare in these regions; only among the Mountain Men of Gidestan would they be likely to see so many blondes in the same group. Also, the attackers used a form of magic that Shiv could not even detect. Moreover, they seem to have arrived on foot and Shiv had just scanned the whole area prior to the attack, finding no one.

In Inglis, Livak meets Ryshad over a casual game of White Raven and guesses that he too is looking for these blondes. When she runs afoul of another group of hostile blondes with strange magic and then Geris is kidnapped by several blondes, Livak brings Ryshad into their band. Since Ryshad, and his partner, Aiten, are agents of Messire D'Olbriot, they have additional resources to contribute to the hunt for Geris and the homebase of the blondes.

This novel is a mystery quest in a fantasy setting. Who are the blonde men? What caused the Empire to fall? How does the "aetheric" magic work? There is a certain amount of violence here and there, but the plot concentrates primarily on these questions. There are also other agents working on the mystery, including Planir and other high-ranking wizards as well as Casuel, a minor mage, and his discovery, Allin, a mageborn whom he is taking to Hadrumal for training ... as soon as they can take care of all these irritating distractions.

This novel is compelling even on re-reading and seems to have an internal logic that is different yet believable. Livak has a character consistent with her history, yet much more empathic than most street people. Ryshad is somewhat of a mystery in this novel, but is further developed in later volumes. Planir is totally inscrutable, except through his deeds; he seems to be working for the long-term best interests of society as a whole, sometimes to the short-term detriment of Hadrumal itself.

Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys tales of wizards and mages, thieves, warriors, and great adventure with some romance.

Rating:
Summary: A Fantasy Series With Attitude and Wit
Review: In her debut novel, McKenna weaves a rich and complex tapestry of a world, against which she spins a colorful and engaging adventure yarn. The Thief's Gamble introduces a new, pre-industrial-period fantasy series with attitude and wit.

Livak, first-person narrator of the main storyline, has spent ten years building a life as a professional thief, gambler, and con artist. She's smart, gutsy, practical, and has a well-developed sense of honor. Given her past, her outlook predictably edges toward cynical, but she manages to retain a dry sense of humor. She's often underestimated because of her sex, something she uses to good advantage.

To replenish her dwindling funds while awaiting an overdue confederate, Livak gambles on being able to successfully steal, and then peddle to some traveling antiquities dealers, a minor artifact from the Old Tormalin Empire. Unfortunately, the dealers recognize the item, having already tried to purchase it from its rightful owner. Worse, they're really agents for the famed wizards of Hadrumal, whose magical powers don't dismay Livak nearly as much as their purposeful single-mindedness. Next thing Livak knows, she's working for them, contracted to steal other artifacts they aren't able to buy outright.

McKenna wastes no time on extended background discussion; readers are tossed into the story like swimmers diving blindly into mid-river, puzzling out the way of the currents and the lay of the land to either side while simultaneously trying to remain afloat as events move along. After Livak's initial gamble, the stakes keep getting raised. What started as a simple matter of thievery escalates into physical danger when she, her new partners, and others around them are repeatedly harried and attacked by a mysterious bunch of brutal blond strangers. Bodies begin to pile up.

Despite the book's length, McKenna's writing is surprisingly lean. Neither she nor her characters are given to flowery phrasings. The story takes so long to relate because McKenna really has that much story to tell. Several stories, in fact, some of which unfold as Livak meets up with various characters, while others take place in third-person alternate narration centering on Hadrumal's Archmage Planir and on the arrogant and incompetent wizard Casuel Devoir. The artifacts and the blond strangers are the key links, revealing glimpses of a powerful ancient magic that isn't as dead as the wizards first thought, and of a massing threat to the rebuilt Empire.

This is an amazing debut, with tight plotting and very few of the typical basic writing errors. McKenna's chosen a difficult route in deciding to keep the story moving rather than halting the action for lengthy and potentially tedious foundation work, but she handles it well. There may be some very slight stumbles as readers grope to make sense of where the ever-expanding web of events is leading, but after all, Livak and her associates are in pretty much the same fix. The Thief's Gamble sketches out an intriguing conflict to be further explored in future books.

Rating:
Summary: Good start to a potentially great writing career
Review: Two of the hardest things to do in fantasy are (a) creating a believable world and magic system and (b) creating sympathetic characters to root for. In her first book, Juliet McKenna manages to do both. Her world is not that complex compared to high fantasy, having no talking animals, orcs, or elves, but once she gets going it is entirely believable. The first half of the book is a little hard to get into because she's juggling too many characters and storylines but once she can concentrate on one or two characters and storylines everything comes together very well. At first I was afraid I had wasted my money buying all three books in the series at once, but as it turned out I can't wait to get to the second book. Livak and Ryshad are both compelling if not captivating characters and, although the magic systems are not very well explained, there is enough variety in the elemental magicians to be believable and provide some tension and comic relief. The enemy is well described and McKenna giving them a different sort of magic that can't be used by the elemental magicians was something I hadn't seen before.