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.

Comments

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I don't know, I'm not a second-world fantasy fan, and I really enjoyed this book. I particularly liked seeing Acacia as a metaphor for America, another country where the ruling class likes to ignore or forget the deaths and suffering that put them in power, the laboring class that keeps them there, and the common people who give up their children (right now as soldiers) so the rest can be free.

I also appreciated the very individual relationships between the children and their father, and how that was a hands-on relationship, with him putting them to bed and everything. There are not enough intimate depictions of fatherhood in the genre.

Some of the plot points, like the hidden passageways conveniently being discovered by one of the children and forgotten by *everyone else* seemed... both contrived and overly familiar. But on the whole I found the writing refreshing and the perspectives interesting. Complex characters instead of just out-and-out bad guys. That sort of thing.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Mm, it does have a lot of good points. I think it's probably telling that it occurred to me early on that the right benchmark for comparison would be Tigana.

I did enjoy reading it - I probably wouldn't have been so harsh if I hadn't. It just irritates me to see what's basically a really good book let down by those failings.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Oh, damn. Yeah, when the benchmark is Tigana, which I think is one of the single best stand-alone fantasies out there, it's going to be hard to live up to that.

Thanks for the warning.

ETA: By which I mean, I'm still going to read this, in my copious free time, but it's good to know likely sources of disappointment.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

I had huge issues with the POV changes in this one, and some other things -- I talked about it a little bit in this post (http://jacquez.livejournal.com/634065.html).

I did end up not finishing the book, though, for...well, for the reasons I mention. I feel in some ways like that is a shame, because there was a kernel of something really good in there, but I just couldn't get at it.

[mirrorshard.livejournal.com]

Yes, I see just what you mean there. I felt a bit alienated by the POV changes too, but it didn't strike me quite as hard.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

This is one of the few fantasy books I ever bothered to read, honestly. Mostly because it wasn't full of trolls and whatnot. It was the first time I'd read fantasy that included people like me in it (it was after this I read Le Guin's Earthsea series) and I was just really happy to not have to throw a book across a room for a change of pace.

I really liked it and am waiting for the next one.

N.