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A review by duffypratt
Grand Conspiracy by Janny Wurts
3.0
I'm having a love/hate relationship with this series.
In this book, the pacing is much better than in the last one, and she does a very good job with some formerly minor characters. We revisit places a generation later, and she handles that extremely well. But there are also some things that remain which drive me nuts, mostly in her writing style. She still has a penchant for misusing "if" at the beginning of sentences. She tends to use it in the sense of "even if," but the "even if" that she uses is still just a conjunction, and never something that might or might not be true. In the last book, it seemed like there was a construction like that at least once a page. Here, it's not so bad.
What I've noticed here are that there are words she simply misuses. At one point, she remarks that a character waited with "rife anticipation." Under no accepted meaning of the word "rife" does this make much sense, and she misused this word at least five times that I noticed. Another example is "rime." Rime is a coating of ice or frost (as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). But a couple of times she talks about the rime of someone's beard, and it's a black beard and not frozen. So I can only conclude that she thinks she likes the sound of the word, but she doesn't know what it means. This wouldn't be so bad, except that she goes to great lengths to "show off" in her writing, and if you are going to do that, you better be extremely good at it. Sometimes she is, but often she is not.
Spoilers ahead: My other main problem with this book is that I don't buy the set-up. The witches have cast a spell on a youth so that he will grow up to look exactly like Arithon. The idea is that the youth will be captured and sentenced to die, and Arithon will come to his rescue, thus allowing the witches to trap him. It will take 25 years for this to mature. But the central idea is that the witches know that Arithon will not stand for another person to die in his name. In the meantime, over those decades, Arithon's half brother is purging the land of magic, by putting to death any magic users because they would be in league with Arithon, the master of Shadow. Why does Arithon not come to the rescue of any of the magic users? They are being killed because of him just as much as the youth would be, but for some reason, the youth bearing Arithon's face is just too much, and Arithon is willing to risk himself and all that he stands for to save this innocent, but not any of the other innocents who might be of much more use to him? It just doesn't make sense to me.
Given that it doesn't make sense, I think Wurts (through the haze of her writing style) executes this story very well. There was a section in the middle of the book where the youth comes to the city to make his reputation. In this passage, Wurts is basically riffing on the beginning of the Three Musketeers, and it was a lot of fun. Actually, everything involving this character was good. I even enjoyed his pigheadedness in insisting Arithon, who has rescued him, must be evil because he has been accused for so long, even though his accusers are the same people who would have falsely condemned him to death.
At this point, I'm just less than halfway through the series. As with the last book, I'm not sure whether I'm going to continue or not. Nothing is driving me forward with excitement, but the series is good enough that I will probably pick up the next book in a couple of months.
In this book, the pacing is much better than in the last one, and she does a very good job with some formerly minor characters. We revisit places a generation later, and she handles that extremely well. But there are also some things that remain which drive me nuts, mostly in her writing style. She still has a penchant for misusing "if" at the beginning of sentences. She tends to use it in the sense of "even if," but the "even if" that she uses is still just a conjunction, and never something that might or might not be true. In the last book, it seemed like there was a construction like that at least once a page. Here, it's not so bad.
What I've noticed here are that there are words she simply misuses. At one point, she remarks that a character waited with "rife anticipation." Under no accepted meaning of the word "rife" does this make much sense, and she misused this word at least five times that I noticed. Another example is "rime." Rime is a coating of ice or frost (as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). But a couple of times she talks about the rime of someone's beard, and it's a black beard and not frozen. So I can only conclude that she thinks she likes the sound of the word, but she doesn't know what it means. This wouldn't be so bad, except that she goes to great lengths to "show off" in her writing, and if you are going to do that, you better be extremely good at it. Sometimes she is, but often she is not.
Spoilers ahead: My other main problem with this book is that I don't buy the set-up. The witches have cast a spell on a youth so that he will grow up to look exactly like Arithon. The idea is that the youth will be captured and sentenced to die, and Arithon will come to his rescue, thus allowing the witches to trap him. It will take 25 years for this to mature. But the central idea is that the witches know that Arithon will not stand for another person to die in his name. In the meantime, over those decades, Arithon's half brother is purging the land of magic, by putting to death any magic users because they would be in league with Arithon, the master of Shadow. Why does Arithon not come to the rescue of any of the magic users? They are being killed because of him just as much as the youth would be, but for some reason, the youth bearing Arithon's face is just too much, and Arithon is willing to risk himself and all that he stands for to save this innocent, but not any of the other innocents who might be of much more use to him? It just doesn't make sense to me.
Given that it doesn't make sense, I think Wurts (through the haze of her writing style) executes this story very well. There was a section in the middle of the book where the youth comes to the city to make his reputation. In this passage, Wurts is basically riffing on the beginning of the Three Musketeers, and it was a lot of fun. Actually, everything involving this character was good. I even enjoyed his pigheadedness in insisting Arithon, who has rescued him, must be evil because he has been accused for so long, even though his accusers are the same people who would have falsely condemned him to death.
At this point, I'm just less than halfway through the series. As with the last book, I'm not sure whether I'm going to continue or not. Nothing is driving me forward with excitement, but the series is good enough that I will probably pick up the next book in a couple of months.