• nyan@lemmy.cafe
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    1 year ago

    Read Britain’s Winterlight over the weekend. Was about the book I’d been expecting (entertaining but not brilliant fantasy adventure)—I just wish I’d been able to get it in MMPB instead of trade. (Yeah, I know, no F&SF publisher except Baen does MMPB format anymore. Annoying as hell when I’m trying to shelve things that shifted format in mid-series.)

    I haven’t decided what I’m going to pull from my to-read stack for this Friday night, although I think I might go SF this time.

    • dresden@discuss.online
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      1 year ago

      That’s a big pet peeve of me. I don’t care too much about the format of the books, bigger, small, hardcover, paperback etc. but I want whole series to be same format. I used to be similar about covers, but I have given up that battle. Though, I am losing the size battle too.

      How is the Green Rider series in general? And is it finished, or still continuing?

      • nyan@lemmy.cafe
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        1 year ago

        I get the impression the series is continuing, or at least there were major plot strands still dangling at the end of Winterlight. It’s probably going to run to 1-2 more books, depending on whether the author intends to tackle the remaining potential antagonists serially or simultaneously. Currently the author seems more interested in producing side-story novellas.

        In general, the series is . . . okay. I don’t seek out each new book in hardcover and then insist on reading it the same week, but I do keep coming back for more. The setting is pretty traditional (medieval technology, elf-analogues, magic is uncommon but extant), but the plot manages to be different enough to keep it from falling too deep into the LotR-clone trap. Part of that’s the protagonist—a very determined and fairly competent young woman, even if she does keep getting into trouble—and part of it’s that the author had the sense not to structure the thing as a group road trip.

        My main issues with the series so far have been that it spends too much time on an issue involving the protagonist’s love life (I realize it’s a complicated situation, but it isn’t one that I’m especially interested in), and one volume has only tangential relevance to the main plot—what significant content it does have wasn’t enough to make reading the whole thing worthwhile to me. One complaint I’ve heard from others is that the horses are unrealistic, but an explanation for that does get provided eventually.