The Pretender (The Chaos Gate Trilogy, Book 2)

Rating:
Summary: The best book of the trilogy
Review: This book is one of the few 'middle books' I've ever read that hasn't dropped the pace from the first book or served only as a mildly interesting prelude to the third. Fantasy trilogies tend to have a certain pace, I think, that I've gotten used to: setting the stage in the first book, holding it or slipping a little in the middle, and then bringing it all up fast and furious in the end. So I started _The Pretender_ with fairly high expectations- I'd loved everything else by Louise Cooper that I'd read, and _The Deceiver_, the first book, was very good- but thinking that it would follow the same pattern as most everything else.

I've never been so glad to be wrong.

_The Pretender_ has two main plots- one focused on happenings in the Star Peninsula and the Circle, the other on the Summer Isle in the south. Both have excellent scenes- especially near the end- and both are resolved (as much as plots in a middle book of a trilogy get resolved) beautifully. Without giving too much away, there are scenes where both the main characters in the book are in contact with more-than-mortal powers. Those scenes were the best, played out with awe and reverence as if the author had been there and wanted the audience to feel what she did.

The writing maintains a level just below this for the rest of the book, and the character development fits the writing style extraordinarily well. At times- especially, it seems, in middle books of trilogies- I have had the feeling that the style the author uses for one character has influenced the style he or she uses for another, and they don't seem like separate people. In this case, they were. Every character had his or her own means of telling the story, dealing with fears and concerns (even when those concerns were similiar), and growing and building on what they were in _The Deceiver_ to what they must become.

I didn't give this book five stars only because it isn't the best book by Louise Cooper that I've read. (That's _Star Ascendant_). But don't let that discourage you from reading it, or the rest of the trilogy. High marks, very much so.