I finished reading this last night, a couple days ahead of my personal schedule. (Listen, don't ask about my OCD-like reading schedule. It won't make sense and will only make you think I'm nuts.) This had more to do with the fact that I was in real need for some escapism more than this book being good.
For one thing, it's high fantasy. I don't know if I let this on heavily enough in the intro post, but I utterly loathe high fantasy. Fighting orcs in the forest works for video games and maybe even movies, but in books it's boring. That's the main reason that I, who really like fantasy, don't like the fantasy classics and mainstays like Tolkien, Jordan, or Goodkind. Because high fantasy sucks and is rife with archetypes and formula.
This book is definitely hurting from archetypes and formula. The story itself starts with a prologue that is literally their world's creation myth. Fuckin' A. For serious? You can't come up with a better way to establish your pantheon and main conflict than a prologue that talks about how the land was created, and the people, and all that shit? Listen, Jackie, I know you can. What the fuck, sweetheart?
"If you hate high fantasy, why did you read this?" For two reasons, Gentle Reader. One, it was written by Jacqueline Carey. She wrote the Kushiel Trilogy, and then the sequel trilogy about Imriel. Those books are among my very favorites. In high school, I got up at three in the morning to read more of Kushiel's Dart, and read it all morning, and all day, until I finished it. My hands were black with smudged ink from the pages. Very few books in my library have held me like that, and it was a combination of the language, the story, and the characters that held me all the way through.
The language in her writing is much the same here, even though it is in third-person for once. I still don't think that it translates as well from first-person POV to third. It jostles the reader in a way that it didn't in her first-person books. In the first-person books, you could just attribute it to the way that the character thinks. Now it just looks like she is trying to hide something in the multitude of words you have to look up.
BTW, this book is good if you want to get distracted researching what she's talking about. I learned a lot about plate armor and the reproduction of grasses. But I think it was Stephen King in On Writing that said that you shouldn't write fiction to teach someone something.
The story of Banewreaker is this: Lord of the Rings from the perspective of the evil guys. I wish I was kidding. The supposed good guys even have a character among them that is referred to as the "Bearer". He carries a Mcgaffin that has to be taken to the evil land to destroy the power of the evil guy. He has a group that protects him that is split up by an attack by the evil guys. Seriously. These are things that happen. The main characters are actually the people who are the right hand men of the evil guy.
One thing that Carey does seem to try to explore in almost all of the books she's written that I've read is an examination of sex and religion, and how they relate. In her Kushiel books, it's mostly how people use sex to essentially pray and give reverance to their gods. In this series, the evil guy gave humans the ability to fuck and reproduce, and the god Haomane wants him to take this away. Because Sex = Bad!!! Even though Haomane's own sentient creations, the Ellyl, are dying out because they do not have the desire to reproduce, which is what Satoris, the evil guy, gave Men. There is an Ellyl woman the story surrounds also, who is naive to a goddamn fault. "The whole thing would be over if you just submitted to Haomane's wishes!" What if Haomane is wrong, you fucking cunt? The whole thing stank of blind faith and fundamentalism, and all it did was make me want the main characters to kill her even more. But they refused to, because they are dicks. You have to give the readers something, Jackie.
And for fuck's sake, we know they are elves and orcs. Why are you calling them Ellyl and Fjeltroll? You described a Fjeltroll in detail, and you would have saved space by just calling it an orc. Because it's an orc.
But on the other hand, I was craving escapism, and high fantasy is very good at helping you mentally escape. It probably didn't help that I was also doing a lot of D&D related research, even though our campaign setting isn't going to be high fantasy either... But still.
I don't know if you could tell from my previous statements up there, but there is another reason I read this: this was actually a reread for me. I reread this book, which has a lot of things that I hate. Why did I reread it?
Because I couldn't remember anything that had happened in it.
I'm sorry, but that's essentially a book killer.
5.5/10
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