“A beautifully spun fantasy” of love, war, rebirth, and magical destiny, based on the haunting folklore of England, Ireland, and Scotland (Andre Norton). In The Ill-Made Mute, a wretched, nameless mute awakens without a memory in a lofty tower upon whose battlements winged horses and flying ships make landfall. The amnesiac longs to escape and roam the wild landscape in search of a past, a name, … search of a past, a name, and a destiny. But the tales the servants whisper by the hearth all turn out to be true: The legendary creatures that plague the world beyond the castle walls are real and innumerable. Travelers in this beautiful, eerie wilderness must beware. . . .
The Lady of the Sorrows begins with a newly minted lady carrying important tidings to the King-Emperor of Caermelor. In her heart, she longs to encounter the king’s ranger Thorn, but upon reaching the royal court she learns that the ruler and his men have gone to war against the forces of wickedness that are threatening the realms of mortals. As the maiden awaits their return, a dreadful suspicion unfolds: The brutal Lord Huon and his monstrous Wild Hunt are attacking again and again—is she the target they seek?
In The Battle of Evernight, the Lady of the Sorrows must save her loved ones from catastrophe by uncovering the secrets of her past. She journeys to the terrible fortress of the Raven Prince in Evernight, despite the Bitterbynde curse that is distorting her memories and the onset of a debilitating malady for which a cure may never be found. As a battle for the destiny of the world begins, the lady must make a fateful decision. If she reveals what she knows, she will liberate 2 worlds—or incite the downfall of everything she loves.
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Wonderful prose, but I felt the author enjoyed her world-building at the expense of the story. The plot dragged in many places as a result.
Excellent description of mythical beings. Imaginative.
Tedious
A really good read.
This was well written, but someone without a good English language background would be stumped by some of the words. I thought it was great, and descriptions were amazing. Not my usual genre but a great book
What an engrossing and hard-to-put-down book! The characters are complex and beautifully developed and described. Environments are original and the society created is complex and convincing.
The author knows her Celtic mythology and Fairyland. The story is robust and I was involved fully in the characters. Sometimes the author was a little too flowery in her description for me, but it did not keep me from reading the whole trilogy. Don’t worry, flowery language does not mean lack of danger. A Good Read.
wonderful storytelling and imagery, and a haunting journey through the dark side of faerie tales. The writing style can hold you for hours at a time.
The synopsis/book cover of the first book made me REALLY want to read this… However, it’s NOT EASY TO READ. It was very descriptive with lots of imagery, and that was beautiful, poetic, even lovely (that’s why it’s 2 stars and not one), but it also made the plot move really slow… GLACIAL…. omg… I had no patience for it. Balance, people! Describe but keep things moving!
Great read for new fantasy fiction readers. Story line is easy to follow and characters remain consistent with some growth. Trilogy has good progression and wraps up very satisfactorily but could easily be expanded. Will watch for additions to this world.
I didn’t finish it as after the slow pace of volume one I couldn’t face two more volumes. I will probably return to it but. . . not for awhile.
Needs real editing. That said the story provides unique magic and world-building.
The author creates a very complex world with lots of subplots and twists to keep the story going. However the unusual spellings and accents make the story itself very hard to read. If you put in the effort to continue the journey the characters are unique and colorful. The world evolves with the tale itself becoming richer and more nuanced.
I love this series. The author describes things and you feel as if you are there. The character building is amazing!
I definitely recommend reading these books on a kindle so you can use the dictionary function for tricky words. There are some not even the dictionary knows.
The language and mythology really is gorgeous, as is the overall world building. It seems like most fantasy these days is written at a pretty easy reading level so it was nice to read something that challenged me. It does get easier to read as it goes on. I appreciate how so many different fairy stories are incorporated in without making the plot too convoluted.
The main complaints I have have to do with pacing. Each book is about 600 pages but only broken down into about 10 chapters. There are plenty of decent stopping places within chapters at least, but they often aren’t marked with a page break. In addition to that, there are many extraneous events that don’t seem to move the plot or character development forward (it cuts back on this after about half way through the second book). It’s all very creative and in beautiful language, so I’m not as bothered by it as I would be in other books. But if you’re a slow reader it’s probably going to start feeling pointless to you.
The third book has a rather obnoxious plot arc. It actually starts out pretty fast (in contrast to the first and second books that start slow and become faster about half way through), then there’s the climactic Battle of Evernight the book is named for. Once it got there I expected to be able to finish the book in one sitting since the plot seemed mostly resolved, but no, it spends a loooong time dilly dallying before getting in the last resolution of the plot. It gets to a point where, even if you loved the book so far, you’ll probably be like “please let this thing hurry up and be over.” It doesn’t help that at the very end, in the last chapter, there’s this random unnecessary plot twist that gets quickly resolved in the last couple pages.
Lastly, there were some things in the last book that came close to wrecking the book for me. One thing is the main character’s age. In the first book she seems to be a teenager. In the second book, literally all the male characters are being attracted to her and proposing marriage to her, so I adjusted my estimate of her age to early twenties. There are enough times that her hair grows from short to long and she learns skills over periods of time that even if she started as a teenager she probably would have aged to her twenties. Her interactions with characters who are stated to be teenagers and the age of her love interest also seem to confirm this. Well, then suddenly in the last book she’s described as a “damsel not yet eighteen.” And in that one line basically all the male characters become dudes who creep on teenagers. It also makes the main character more excessively perfect than she already was. I mean, not only is she the most beautiful mortal in the world, she’s also the cleverest and the nicest and she has all these skills a teenager wouldn’t have had time in her life to have mastered. And though she isn’t exceptionally emotionally stable, she’s more emotionally stable than one would expect of a teenager. Although, come to think of it, negative emotions are not very well evoked in this book in general, so maybe that’s why she seems emotionally stable. You can feel the main character’s infatuation with Thorn (another excessively perfect character), but not her grief over the death of some of her friends (or their seeming death, as the case may be). Anyway, I’m choosing to just pretend she was an adult all along and that line didn’t happen. In addition to her age, there are some other things that introduce power imbalances to her romantic relationship that I don’t think are adequately addressed. Not going to elaborate because spoilers.
Plot and story: 5
Writing technique: 2
World-building:5
Characters: 3
(Average = 3.75)
STORY
The plotting here is masterful and truly epic. Because It begins mid story when the MC loses all memory, It’s especially hard to give a recap without spoilers. Even to reveal the MCs real name or gender would be a spoiler. It begins small, as a good epic tale often will, with a character who desires to see more of the world than their meager circumstances allow. They stow away on a flying ship which then ends up being attacked by pirates. And the misadventures continue for a while in that vein. Things escalate when information comes to our hero that rightfully needs to be given to the king. And so a quest begins.
Eventually, when memory is restored, a new quest is revealed which involves not only Erith, the world of Man, but the Faerie Realm as well.
There is a slight bit of predictability when the author uses the same plotting technique twice. Without revealing too much, it’s the technique where “the thing you’ve been seeking was with you all along” (as in the Wizard of Oz). But forgivable since it affects only a dozen(ish) pages not the whole trilogy. Otherwise, the plot s faultless (though not overly exciting).
Which reminds me.. I read this trilogy straight through, as if it were one long book. So I didn’t really pay attention to where each book ended and whether each had a legit tale of it’s own. Normally that’s important but I’ve missed noticing it this time.
WRITING
Here’s where the book fails. More exciting than writing that was at fault really. When most non-writers say “editing” they usually mean copy-editing or proofreading, but that’s not what I mean. The proofing was more than adequate. In the whole 1400 pages I found only two typos and two other places where the author uses an obscure word that I thought was used incorrectly. But real story-editing was lacking. If the author hired an editor at all, either she willfully ignored their advice or the editor was unqualified to handle this genre.
The more egregious error was the long rambling passages of useless and overly florid description. Not only description but whole scenes (or even chapters) that were unnecessary to the plots and only slightly interesting as background. A skilled editor would have cut this to slightly over half of its current length and lose nothing of importance. Near the end I was skimming over pages, just trying to pick out the nouns and verbs and get enough of an impression to get through.
The other editing flaw was in the excessive use of obscure and archaic language. This is less serious but it’s still an issue of sorts. The author has an afterword where she apologizes about this, so I think it was an intentional inclusion in opposition to the advice of others. The words themselves are not an issue (except in the case of the very few that I think were used incorrectly). A love of reading and love of words go hand in hand. But they are often used in ways where context is of no aid in deciphering them. This is a sinful misuse of vocabulary and detracts from the reading experience. It will be helpful to have a very large (multi-volume) dictionary, preferably a very old one as most of these words have been expunged from modern dictionaries. The alternative is to simply skip over these words, which I’m sure the majority of readers will do. I even did so myself a few times, but that’s really a very bad habit to get into, and I blame the author for encouraging it.
WORLD
Possibly the best part of the book was in the well developed world. Based very tightly on Celtic fairy lore, it is obviously very well researched and holds together perfectly. This review is already getting too long so I won’t go into much detail, but if you are at all interested in fairy lore then you will find many wonderful elements here. Not entirely Celtic, there’s a few Germanic elements in there too, but mostly Celtic I think. She doesn’t add much of her own other than changing place names to fit into her world. But what she does include is well done. And fun to read.
CHARACTERS
The individual characters are likeable and unique, but not memorable. The author spends more time describing places and individual character personalities suffer for it. But still, the characters bring likeable rather than loveable still leaves room for the rest of the book to shine.
OVERALL
Overall I’d say, even for being interminably long, it’s still a good read. I’m glad to have read it and probably will do so again. Recommended for most readers.
Very well written but needs some editing. So many descriptions of colors of leaves and scenery seemed ok in the beginning but became grating by the end of the third book
A fascinating, original fantasy with a strong female heroine. The author loves words and sometimes the description bogs down the story’s flow. However, the story is riveting and you want to keep reading.
An engaging retelling of an old tale with wonderful, likeable characters. What an enchanting world where I learned a few new/old words. A fun read! Thank you.
Good read, just not very memorable.