Title: A Tapestry of Spells
Author: Lynn Kurland
Year of publication: 2010
Genre: Fantasy
My rating: 2.5 stars or D
This is the first failure of my new reading policy: it sailed past my 50-page test, but with about 100 pages to go, I was weighing up whether to bother finishing it. I did, and I regret it: this should have been a DNF.
It starts out promisingly enough. Sarah is a suitably sensible, feisty girl who has just watched her wants-to-be-evil brother destroy her house, turn her horse into a dog, and steal all her gold. She decides she better stop him somehow, and seeks out a mage to help her. The two local magic-users are too expensive for her. In one of the first examples of the underlying illogic of this story, she then decides that the mysterious mage on the hill with the fearsome reputation would therefore be the best bet (because mysterious, fearsome mages work for free? I don’t know). Enter Ruith, who is a suitably grouchy misanthrope who has locked his magic away and refuses to use it, and who sends her packing before shortly deciding she’s far too pretty to wander those forests alone (ugly maids can die horribly for all he cares) and joins her on her quest to stop her brother.
So far, so good. The illogic is niggling, but I often give books a free pass on minor irritations because sometimes they’re resolved as secrets are revealed (by the way, Sarah’s “secret” is so laughably in the open to the reader that for a good long time I thought she had a second one that hadn’t been revealed to the reader) and as necessary plot manoeuvres fall into place and the book progresses. But not this time.
Here’s another example of the illogic. Ruith has so far hidden his face from Sarah, who assumes he’s a wizened old man (despite constantly wondering about how spry he is for an old guy), but he falls asleep with his hood off and awakened by a very confused Sarah wondering who the hell he is. Much “amusing” interplay results, including this snippet of dialogue (she’s just handed him a cup of something):
Something that will reveal your true wizened, wrinkled, impossibly ancient and unpleasant self,” she said curtly. “Drink it and be thinking on a very believable tale that will explain why it is you aren’t the old gent I was led to believe you were.”
First line makes it seem like she still thinks he’s an old man and is merely assuming the form of a young one. Second line makes it seem like she does believe he really is a young man after all. The rest of the conversation goes back and forth like this with Sarah seemingly changing her opinion every two seconds. The book is full of little jolts like this one, not bad on their own but very distracting as they build up.
The worst of the illogic comes with Sarah’s injured arm and why Ruith won’t just heal the damn thing already for the vast majority of the book. She’s in pain and he knows it, and he cares for her. Oh, but he won’t use his magic, not even for her? This is a fair excuse right up until he unnecessarily heals some farmer’s horses. At that point, his continued failure to heal her arm just makes him look like an idiot.
But none of this would have made me stop reading the book. The fact that they pick up a whole host of other characters who appear to have nothing to do in the plot but hang around…okay. The fact that they run into several unexplained fights and pick up and quickly lose several unexplained characters…okay. It’s the climax that really made me wish I’d given up early. For starters, the brother character, Daniel, is set up to be such a laughably weak villain the whole way through that it’s hard to feel any tension as the climax approaches. But that’s okay, because it turns out Daniel is not the big bad guy for the climax. No, that’s some other guy who’s never even been mentioned before. That makes for narrative satisfaction…not.
It turns out that this book runs in parallel to the earlier books in the series and that all these issues and extraneous characters and the abrupt introduction of a brand-new big bad at the climax would have made a lot more sense had I read those books first. But the fact of the matter is, I hadn’t, nor had I expected this book to not be a standalone — its subtitle is “a novel of the Nine Kingdoms”, a novel, a, not “first of a new series of the Nine Kingdoms” — and this book simply does not work, and the cliffhanger ending is not at all compelling, unless you’ve read those other books first.
Verdict
If you’ve already read the first three books in the Nine Kingdoms world, you’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of this book than I did, but if you haven’t, this book relies far too heavily on the preceders to work as a standalone novel.
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