David Anthony Durham - Acacia, Part 1

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

This is pretty bog-standard Big Fantasy about royalty and wars. The plotting is good, his sense of what to show and what to narrate is appalling, his characterization is extremely variable. Extremely unusually for Big Fantasy, he shows different races (in the proper sense - none of this pointy-eared metaphor nonsense here, or at least nearly none) with realistic racial tensions and resolutions to them.

I've done a proper review at Cold Iron & Rowan-Wood (in 3 parts, link is to first) but to sum up: worth reading if you're a secondary-world fantasy fan. If you're not, I'd not bother.