King's Dragon

The Crown of Stars series is well-thought out and obviously well-planned. It's epic in scope and it's got a lot of texture. There are many complex characters who we follow in parallel, as in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Some of them are very likable, and there are some really excellent villains (e.g., Hugh). Ms. Elliott's creatures are imaginative and enjoyable, and I especially liked the way they interact with the humans. Ms. Elliott uses a lot of description and therefore her plot moves very slowly (again, similar to WOT).

The writing was inconsistent throughout the series. Sometimes it seems brilliant, but at other times I'd think “why did she tell me that?” or “this could be moving a little faster.” It's often wordy. Her editor could have almost arbitrarily taken out a third of the sentences with no ill effect. Sometimes she over-explains what a character is feeling or his/her motivation when it would have been better to let the dialog or action speak for the character. Sometimes she tells me something too many times (e.g., “but his voice always sounds like that”). I wonder if the inconsistency is due to different editing processes, because it's not like that in all the books, and even some individual books are internally inconsistent. I thought the fourth book, especially, was not well edited.

The pace of these novels is so slow that I found my self bogged down in the middle of book 5 with not much desire to go on, so I decided to quit. I struggled with that decision because I really did want to find out what happened to the characters, but it was taking me too long to get there and the writing style wasn't good enough to make up for the crawling pace (unlike Wheel of Time).

Overall, these books entertained me for a while, especially the first couple of novels. The plot was interesting and the characterization was particularly notable, but it eventually got too slow. I quit in the middle of book 5.
Read more Kate Elliott book reviews at Fantasy Literature .

2.5 stars, marking it as 3 because this isn't a bad book, I just couldn't finish it, couldn't hold myself back from other titles. I usually don't review books that I haven't finished (and how many more times can I say that?), but I had such high hopes for this one that I'm disappointed I couldn't bring myself to keep going with it. The writing is excellent; Elliott is a fantastic fantasy writer and does manage to create characters that I really wanted to see through, and she puts them in interesting situations. The book starts with a man being left by the mother of his child, and the identity of that child is a fairly constant topic of the early part of the book. I really loved the story of Liath, and want to know if she matures and gets past the trauma that she suffers in the early part of her story, but then...

Two things were keeping me from continuing on. There's just not enough of Liath. The other POV is interesting, but what's irritating is that the two POVs are barely connected and I didn't want to wade through more, or skip ahead. Other POVs get introduced and they are even less interesting. I just didn't feel interested in these people and it was irritating to keep pretending.

The other thing that kept distracting me was that this world is basically medieval Europe with a few modifications. Let me be careful in how I say that, as you might think this is a made-up world that just superficially resembles Europe, as in much of fantasy: this is basically a world that has the same geography as Europe, with a feudal system much like Europe in the eleventh century, and a fully-functioning replica of the Roman Catholic Church with a few modifications to its theology. The church hierarchy only differs in its treatment of women, i.e. there are female bishops, deacons, and so on. This was REALLY distracting. I prefer a completely made-up world. I love medieval Europe, but if I want it, I read nonfiction.

So there you go. This is a good book, but these distracting elements made me put it down.