I just finished reading Masquerades by Kate Novak and Jeff Grubb
, tenth book in The Harpers series. I skipped over the ninth book, Crown of Fire
, because I ordered it from Paperbackswap and it hadn’t arrived by the time I wanted to pick up another book.
I have mixed feelings on the book. Most of the main characters are from Novak and Grubb’s earlier book, Azure Bonds
. The problem is, I didn’t actually like any of those characters. They’re entirely too lifeless and one-dimensional and it’s not really worth caring about what happens to them. Despite the characters, the book has a good plot and in defiance of the lack of character development and choppy dialogue, I had to keep reading just to find out what happened next and which factions were victorious and which were destroyed. It wasn’t as bad as a George R.R. Martin book where the plot is enthralling but the writing is about what you’d get from a 5th grader, but it was still fairly dissonant.
Overall I’d give the book 2.5 stars out of 5. If you actually like the characters from Azure Bonds, give it a read. Otherwise it’s probably not worth it. As for Azure Bonds, the gold box game (Curse of the Azure Bonds) was better than the book.
Hello,
New read just saying hi. I found you site via google blog search on Curse of the Azure Bonds, and noticed you posts on writing a mud in C# and was hooked. The later is something I’ve always wanted to-do so I’ll just live vicariously through you for a while.
Simeon
Hello and welcome. Activity here has been a bit low lately, but I expect it will pick up a bit soon. 🙂
I picked up a trilogy by Brent Weeks “The Night Angel Trilogy” which has turned out to be a wonderful and suprising find. I usually stick to authors I like (Salvatore, Jack Whyte, Bernard Cornwell, etc) and rarely venture out of my comfort zone as there is nothing like a 14.5hr Atlanta to Tokyo flight and being stuck with a crap-ass book. Anyway, excellent Sci-Fi/Fantasy trilogy and he does a great job with character and plot development. Nothing like an author that can make you want to kick a characters ass….
Nice. Donaldson was always good at the hero-you-want-to-clobber (Thomas Covenant, Gap Cycle, etc.) but I haven’t really found anyone else that pulls it off well yet.