What You See is What You Get
In the interest of trying to clear out the backlog of books quickly, I'm going to knock off two in one post: Dave Duncan's Impossible Odds, the latest King's Blades novel (in paperback-- I don't buy them in hardcover), and Joel Rosenberg's Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda, the latest Guardians of the Flame book.
Lumping these together actually makes a fair bit of sense, for a number of reasons. For one thing, they share at least one plot element (saying what that is would be a spoiler for both books). They were also both in-transit reading during some of my recent running around, which has caused them to blend together to a small degree.
But mostly, what links these books is that they're each exactly what they appear to be: perfectly competent new entries in continuing series of workmanlike swashbuckling fantasy novels. There's nothing particularly inspired about either, and nothing particularly inspiring, either. They tell straightforward stories in a fairly straightforward manner, and if you liked the previous books in the series, you won't be terribly upset by either.
If pressed, I'd say that the Duncan is the better of the two, because it's a self-contained story with new characters, where the Rosenberg is tying up loose ends in a long and continuing plot. I don't think it's actually true that more time is spent explaining the vast quantities of baggage that the characters have brought in from previous Guardians novels, but it sort of feels that way. It's certainly true that the plot would be nothing without that baggage, so if you haven't read the previous umpteen books, don't even bother. Duncan's book draws on the setting of past Blades novels, but the plot and characters more or less stand on their own after that.
I realize that this isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of either of these books, and you might well be asking why I'm still reading these series in the first place. All I can say is that they served admirably in their intended role, namely, they kept me from fretting about whether the tiny little prop planes I took to and from Sudbury were going to crash. And that's worth eight bucks a pop to me.
Posted at 11:12 PM | link |