Rating: 
Summary: A Shadow on the Glass
Review: Another would-be epic by another would-be Tolkien. "A Shadow on the Glass" is not wholly without merit, but it does overstay its welcome with thin characters and poor writing. Karan and Llian are our girl-and-boy pair on the run, desperately trying to prevent various villains from getting the magic thingamajig - a mirror in this particular case. Meanwhile, a bevy of senior wizards and sorceresses are still trying to resolve some dispute that dates back thousands of years, though you'll have to shell out for the sequel to find out what it is.In truth, the plotting of this is reasonably good. It's the characters that are the problem. Karan is either a portrait of schizophrenia or else Irvine couldn't decide what personality he wanted for her. Sometimes she's bold and leaderlike, other times she's timid and depressed. Llian at first seems like he might be worth reading about, as he gets thrown out of school and forced to struggle with some incorrect assumptions he had made. Unfortunately this never really pans out, and he soon turns into a standard-issue hero. Minor characters don't improve the situation much. And then there's the writing. All of our characters seem to have studied at the comic book school of speech technique. Stock lines such as "I feel like we're being watched" and "What you need to know I will tell you in good time" pop up everywhere. Major violations of the 'show, don't tell rule', unsubtle foreshadowing (Karan keeps announcing that "Great woe will come of it"), poor pictures of emotions, lame action scenes ... "A Shadow on the Glass" is not a total disaster. It does at least feature a big and complicated story that's not wholly predictable. But in the final analysis, there's no there there. There's no reason to keep plowing through it when you can't care about any of the characters. Aspect Fantasy, home to some of the best authors discovered in the past few years, has never let me down before, but any way you slice it there's no excusing this turkey.
Rating: 
Summary: Painfully bad
Review: This is one of the worst written books I've ever read.
It's so bad, it's painfully bad. I read parts aloud
to my wife as a laugh. One scene in particular near the start stands out...
One of the characters (a while since I tossed the book
across the room so I can't remember the name) is talking
to a woman on a hill (she sought him out). For three
pages or so he sprouts monologue to her with no more than the
occasional few words from her regardless of what he says,
then she ups and leaves. Talk about information dumping! I am convinced this book was published without editing.
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