Stormlord Rising by Glenda Larke
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Good stories poorly written seem to be a bit of a theme as of late. The story here, indeed, keeps on being interesting. The plot is overall a bit more innovative than the first book, which is only good. Indeed, the author also seems to have slightly given up on her tendency to feature every plot twist fifty pages ahead, settling mostly for about ten or five in this volume. One can only hope that this entirely disappears in the next book.
However, even with the above in mind, the story is weighed down by a lot of problems. The main one of these would be, for me, the number of contradictions in the world the story takes place in. The religious systems of the various factions are an example of this, but there are many others: the “‘Baster” accent is another one of the very annoying things, where an entire race (nation? faction?) is differentiated by the fact they use a single tense wrong and always say “Ye” instead of “You”. I mean… surely, the author could have thought of something more? Something imaginative perhaps?
The characters are likewise shallow and meaningless. Ryka’s ridiculous adventures strain my patience with the number of u-turns she goes through, especially with every fourth thought of hers being the same; Davim and his successor are fools, having no grasp of strategy or planning; Tarquar is ‘evil’ because he is bored (what a jolly good reason!); Terelle’s thoughts are articulated as if she was five; etc. The only person with a modicum of moral complexity is our stormlord, who is thereby also rendered incapable of acting. Overall, the only character who has managed to maintain being interesting is Iani.
I will only add here that I will read the third book, more because of I don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen rather than looking forward to the book, but that’s that.
