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Title: Shadowplay: Shadowmarch Volume II (Shadowmarch) |
Review of Shadowplay: Shadowmarch Volume II (Shadowmarch)
- With their father and brother taken from them, the royal Eddon twins Barrick and Briony have done their best to hold the kingdom together. But now Barrick has been captured in a failed war against the immortal Twilight People, and Briony has been forced to flee the castle.
Everywhere in the north the fierce Twilight People, led by the ageless warrior- witch Yasammez, hold sway. Old magics are stirring beneath the ancient castle and behind the Shadowline, and the machinations of gods, fairies, and mortals threaten to spread devastation across the entire world.
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Comments for Shadowplay: Shadowmarch Volume II (Shadowmarch)
- Posted on 2008-09-28
Taken critically by reviewers but still great fantasy
Shadowplay: Shadowmarch Volume II (Shadowmarch)
I've read a lot of fantasy and fiction for a high school student. Some reviewers take this book critically and judge the author more than the book itself. This book itself it really a great read, if read like a book your simply curious about.
This is high fantasy at its best. Williams' description is vivid and strong and will absorb you. His plot leads and foreshadowing is tempting and will keep you reading and guessing. You will be surprised by the way this book takes you. You will become the character, and you will relate to them, one way or another. The characters are varied. Whether you like or dislike them as people, you will enjoy reading their stories and guessing their fates.
Williams creates a world that is truly fantasy. This book does no baby the reader. You will go through this like you were in the book and you will have loads of questions about the world, but that doesn't mean you'll get them answered. This book is slow going and the plot lines take their time by seemingly going away or towards each other. An excited reader will find himself pulled into this
However, this book isn't likely to entertain all readers, fantasy or otherwise. This book does go slowly, even for fantasy as is less about the whole plot and more about the journey towards it, rather than where it leads, though you will always guess where that is. The description is long and the character's perceptions are rather straightforward. Mysteries are many and answers are little in this book. It is less of a fast read for quick readers and more of a delicious dessert meant to be taken slowly. The only way to really tell is to read it yourself. All in all, this book delivers what true high fantasy readers are looking for, not the skeptical or harsh readers, but the indulgent and careful ones.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-06-14
Shadowplay
Its a fun book, but you have to read the first book to know what's going on.
Score: 3
- Posted on 2008-05-21
Great Sequel
The second book keeps you just as interested as the first. The story line gets quite a bit more twisted around and many of the plots from the first are addressed and expanded on. Definitely worth the buy if you enjoyed Shadowmarch.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-05-09
An Improvement Over the First Book in the Trilogy
Author Tad Williams' second installment in the Shadowmarch trilogy shows definite improvement over the first, the latter of which left me somewhat unimpressed.
Here, Briony continues her flight from Southmarch and the family who have all but usurped her family's throne. In the process, she's rescued from starvation and the predations of the wilderness by a demigoddess (somewhat reminiscent of Geloe, of "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn"), eventually joining up with a traveling troupe of entertainers whose day job may be acting, but some of whose members have a more cloak-and-dagger midnight shift. Barrick travels with Capt. Vansen and Gyir, the latter bizarre by even fairy standards, and has an unfortunate meeting with a demigod of his own. We encounter captive King Olin at last, a prisoner in a reputedly impregnable city, as the mad Autarch batters at the walls, putting the city's claim to the test. Finally, the Minstrel Tinwright, ever the opportunist, finds being court minstrel to the usurpers a bit more dangerous than he thought, especially since he becomes romantically entangled with the concubine of one of the more ruthless of them - a lady who asks Tinwright to assist her in escaping her captor through death. The mysterious fairy folk, called the Qar, have all but vanished into the city surrounding Southmarch castle - their presence undetected, but the castle under siege nonetheless.
William's character development picks up in this second installment, and it's a welcome change from the first. While Barrick continues to be as annoying and whiny as in the first, Briony comes into her own and is turning into quite an interesting character - not at all the minor role I expected her to play. Tinwright, though unctuous and opportunistic, finds himself squirming in a trap of his own making - and is also proving to be one of the more interesting characters in the series, his moral ambiguity belying the tendency of William's characters to be somewhat two dimensional as regards their morality. Less emphasis is placed on the Qar, with the exception of Gyir, perhaps the most interesting of the Qar aside from the changeling Kayyin, formerly the halfwit Gil. This lack of focus actually benefits the story, as I never found the fairy army a particularly menacing threat from the beginning. The shift in focus in book two from the Funderlings to the sea people is also a benefit, the Funderlings being a bit too much rock-candy-coated Oompa-Loompas compared to the ambivalent natures of the sea folk. Still weak are the Autarch, whose Nero/Caligula-esque behavior seems all too much stock fare relative to someone of Williams' talent, and Chert, the hen-pecked Funderling who seems more a dwarven version of "Step-and-Fetch-It" to be truly credible beyond a fantasy allegory to the old negro stereotype.
All said, a strong follow-up to a weak beginning. Here's hoping the final book follows suit.
Score: 4 - Posted on 2008-05-08
Needed an editor, badly!
My wife and I are both big Tad Williams fans, and so we started this series with a high level of excitement. The first volume we got as a regular paperback, and it was a little disappointing: the world-building was not nearly as brilliant as many of his previous books, we found the twins a little annoying, and a lot of TW's sentences were crazily convoluted. However, it was gripping enough to go out and get us to buy book 2 in this trade paperback form. We should have waited. DO NOT BUY THIS VERSION OF BOOK 2. It is rife with errors, both typos and errors in content. For example, it will say Chaven said something, when it should have said Chert, or it will have a character wake up from his sleep on one page, and still be asleep on the next page. And the sentence structure didn't get any better. Some sentences have an entire separate paragraph's worth of description in the middle, separated from the rest of the sentence just by commas. Both the errors and convoluted sentences made the book hard to follow at times, and even when the meaning was clear, they detracted from the pleasure of reading it. Hopefully an editor will belatedly come along and salvage this book before they print the next edition, and hopefully Book 3 will be put together with more care before it is foisted onto the public.
That being said, a crappy Tad Williams book is still better than a lot of stuff out there, so I can't give it less than 2 stars.
Score: 2
