Storm Lord

Rating:
Summary: I Could Not Finish This Dull Story Of Race & Regency
Review: Tanith Lee is my favorite writer, but every once in a while she publishes some monstrously tedious book like this one. This book is really The Birthgrave with a male for the main character, chronicling the adventures of an angry foundling of mixed descent who discovers he is really the rightful king o' the land. I just hate it when she redoes the same old story again.

Rating:
Summary: A superior sword-and-sorcery novel
Review: This is one of Lee's earlier works, less experimental than many of her later books but a great read. This is good old-fashioned storytelling at its finest, in which the goal of the writer is to keep readers glued to the page, and Storm Lord does. The hero Raldnor is born the rightful heir to the Storm Lord's throne. (In this novel the youngest, not the oldest, son is legal heir because of a belief that a son still in the womb at the time of the Storm Lord's death will be born with the reincarnated soul of the old Storm Lord.) But because his mother is a woman of a despised and subjugated race, she is put out of the way by the old Storm Lord's wife who wants her own infant son to ascend the throne. Raldnor is believed dead and grows up knowing only that he is a half-breed, with the dark skin and eyes of his father and his mother's tell-tale blonde hair. He dyes his hair black and takes service as one of the Storm Lord's soldiers. When he rises to become his half-brother's trusted right-hand man (and his only real friend), his identity is discovered and the rest of the book unfolds in a complex pattern of fate, treachery, passion, and revenge. Tanith Lee's sense of irony elevates Storm Lord well above the usual run of sword-and-sorcery; most of them don't contain anything like the emotional intensity found here. I wish this book hadn't gone out of print! But trust me, it's worth tracking down.