Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Touched by the Gods is a competent and entertaining standalone fantasy. At birth, Malledd is named the gods’ chosen champion. He grows up in strange times: the gods stop speaking through oracles, non-divine magic appears, and it begins to appear that the Empire itself is threatened. Malledd hates being singled out, though, and is skeptical that he really was marked by the gods. Hardly anyone in the outside world knows that he was named at birth; will he step forward in the Empire’s need?
Well, of course he will—this isn’t a Stephen Donaldson book, after all—but why and how he joins the struggle is portrayed sensibly. That’s my predominant impression of this book: not flashy in plot, character, or style, but a thoughtful working-out of the actual experience of an adult facing the claim that he is a divine champion. It’s a good story in an interesting world, moves briskly, and while I doubt I’ll re-read it, I’m perfectly happy to have read it.
Interesting. This is the second LWE I tried to read. The first, Dragon Weather pretty much fits your comments here about Touched: competent, fairly interesting, worth reading, probably not anything I’ll read again. So I grabbed Touched from the library a couple months ago to give it a try. Maybe I was just having a bad hair day(s) or something, but I bogged down about a hundred or so pages into it. I just was finding that I not only didn’t care about any of the characters, the plot itself wasn’t doing anything for me either. I ended up turning it in without finishing it.
LWE is, as far as I’m concerned, one of the good authors of r.a.sf.w, by which I mean he’s a good member of the community–interesting to read his comments, thoughtful, polite, etc. (see also Brenda Clough, Jo Walton (in past days); but see Flint and Stirling for examples of the opposite). So I would like to also like his books. Not a big deal, though.
Perhaps it’s that reading fast and having lots of time to read, the last few days, builds up momentum? If I had spread it out over several days, it might have been different.
And yeah, I picked this up for the same reason–seems like an interesting person, would like to like his books. This made me want to pick up other books–but not LWE’s, though, The Curse of Chalion, to finish a review that’s been mostly-done for a couple of months…
(And, Trent? It is unspeakably geeky for you to use Bluebook signals in casual conversation–and even worse that my first reaction was, “but see has to be in a separate citation sentence…)
Hey, I threw those in just for you. Law students and their stupid in-jokes….