Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: This is a very wonderful piece of fantasy fiction. Everything about it, from the magic to the design of the world. I love the coverage of magic that Drake has put into this novel. The characters are like life and everything makes sense. And I must add that my favorite character was prehaps Zahag, the talking ape. This is truly epic fantasy to its best, and most brilliant. David Drake is a master of the art!
Rating:
Summary: Great setting to an original series
Review: This was a great book, I just finished it last night, 600+ pages in 3 nights of about 2.5 hours reading each night, I could not puit it down. The setting is about the most original Fantasy out there when compared with all the Continent spanning Epics out there. (Face it, all the major epics main characters end up trouncing around there home continent for most of the story) Here is a brand new series that has developed a richness in its setting of a few islands (So Far) that most writers can make with their entire world (Jordan and Goodkind are 2 other examples of great authors with remarkably rich settings, but hey, they have got 7 and 4 books out so far, not 1) this book has the potential to surpass these 2 great authors if Drake can keep up his creative flow. I like the entire idea of setting it among islands, this allows for short distances being great cultural gaps and it is remarkable. The only shortcoming is the fact that after Queen of Demons comes out, You wi! ll have to wait at least another year for the next book. And Drake is not afraid to kill off his characters. It is not often that you see one of the coolest characters in fantasy (and he is not a wizard either) get killed, a guy with an ancient king messing around with his head, and a guy who kills demons with his bare hands just a few minutes after he befriends another one! This series promises to be remarkable. Once more a series that goes ages beyond the "Lord Of The Rings"
Rating: 
Summary: Nothing new, but overall a nice read
Review: While the plot (orpahn boy is actually the long-lost king) is nothing new and most of the characters I've seen before, Drake's world-building is credible and the story hops along at an energetic pace and managed to keep me reading despite what I feel to be writing under par.David Drake's style is replete with simile metaphor and analogy that most often is so verbose that the comparison is lost by the time I finish the sentence. The sentences themselves are clumsy and inarticulate and distract me from what is actually trying to be said. I fnd the characters to be mono-dimensional and seriously lacking in human motivation. The plotting flows like a role-playing game jumping from: scene-encounter enemy/situation-fight enemy/situation-learn piece of epic plotting-vanquish enemy/solve situation-be transported to next scene-repeat process with character number 2. Despite all of it's flaws Queen of Demons was a marginal improvement on the first book in the series and I still read the whole thing so there must have been something about it that I liked enough to keep turning pages (though I am not sure what it is because every page kept reminding me that I was reading a story and never succeeded in "transporting me away from the mundane world" like when you see a movie with a famous actor and you are never sold on his character because you keep thinking "Oh, that's Brad Pitt"). I am not sure that I will bother to reed the next installment in the series, but I could get bored and buy it anyway for lack of anything better to read.
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