Product Description
For Karigan G’ladheon, the call of magic in her blood is too strong to resist. Karigan returns to the Green Riders, the magical messengers of the king, to find she’s badly needed. Rider magic has become unstable, many Riders have been lost, and the Rider corps is seriously threatened. The timing couldn’t be worse. An ancient evil, long dormant, has reawakened, and the world is in peril. Karigan must face deadly danger and complex magic to save the kingdom from certain doom.
Eon @ 12:09 am
From early on in The High King’s Tomb, alarm bells started going off in my head. It doesn’t take very long, if you’ve read the other two books (and you should have), to realize that a “grab the reader by the throat” event is conspicuously absent from the beginning of the story. There’s one in the first book, there’s one in the second book, but The High King’s Tomb starts out on a noticeably meandering path.
And it continues to meander, without a great deal of urgency, for a long time. A lot of events happen, some of them interesting in relation to the world Britain has created, but overall none of them seem hugely relevant to solving the tensions of the main plot arc. In fact, they just seem to add in a bunch of new tensions without solving any old ones. Uh oh.
It takes a long time for the reader to understand why this book is called The High King’s Tomb. By then, a lot of the elements of the book are coming together and making more sense for the plot of this book, but no amount of smoke and mirrors can distract the reader from the fact that it didn’t really offer any resolution on the plot of the series as a whole. With almost 700 pages, more should have been resolved. I reiterate: Uh oh.
Britain has always gotten away with certain things (like Deus Ex Machina solutions) in part due to the strength of her characters. This time I’m not sure it’ll be enough to pull some readers through. Main character Karigan mostly annoys me in this book. She doesn’t get off on a good foot, with her diatribe about brothels early on. Pages of inner monologue about how wrong it is to sell your body, you should only be with the one you love, blah blah blah, oh! oh! oh! how terrible…I want to scream. Eventually I started to feel like Britain is trying way too hard to keep Karigan from being perfect that she’s sliding towards backwards and unlikable instead.
Other returning characters are a mixed bag. Estora, who had struck me in the previous books as being a strong, elegant young woman with a lot of bravery, hits romance heroine levels of stupidity in this books. She redeems herself a little by realizing that she’s being stupid, but her demeanor here just seems like an excuse to make the book’s storyline work. Alton and Merdigen, at the wall, both retain fairly high levels of interest, though. And then there are a number minor characters whom you’ll likely wish had had slightly larger rolls.
New characters play out similar. You have Damien Frost and Lady who are interesting, in spite of being quite obviously based on Tom Bombadil and Goldberry from LotR. Yet you also have Fergal, a Green Rider trainee with an abusive past, who does things so cruel and idiotic that his “redemption” feels forced. And there’s Amberhill, who has two aspects, the first being that he’s dumb as a brick. This makes him unbelievable in the role of a mysterious, charming thief ala Zorro…not to mention sad evidence that Britain seems to think it’s necessary to stuff in every fantasy staple possible.
Though in a lot of ways I enjoyed the book and the alarm bells quieted some, they didn’t go away completely. And Britain saying that she will “let the needs of the story dictate its own length” scares the bejeebus out of me. If the series ends at four books then fine, I can deal with the transition book that The High King’s Tomb obviously is. But if it doesn’t? Fantasy writers need to put a tighter rein on themselves, need to plan better before jumping into their works, or we’re going to end up with a whole slew of unfinished Wheel of Time type series on the shelves. Three and a half stars.
L. A. Saloiye @ 12:36 am
I love this series. The fact that there is a normal, healthy woman as the main character is refreshing. I originally read the Green Rider as a stand alone book. I throughly enjoyed it. This present book was wonderful because we were able to re-meet many of the characters. However what isn’t so exciting is that there is another book in the series. Don’t get me wrong, I love this series and there definitely needs to be another book, but I don’t want to wait any longer. The waits in between the books are massive. I know it takes time to get books written, edited, and published but sometimes the interim seems a bit ridiculous. That and I thought this was going to be a trilogy, similar to Lord of the Rings.
All complaining aside this was an excellent book, there was more down time throughout the adventures but this isn’t a bad thing. It allows for more character development. We don’t get to see Zachary as much as I would have liked, but his cousin offers us a new treat. Overall this is an excellent addition to the series. Hopefully it won’t take another 3 years for the next book in the series.
Laura J. @ 1:58 am
After waiting four years for a follow-up to Britain’s strong First Rider’s Call, the second in the Green Rider sequence, I was thrilled to finally get my hands on The High King’s Tomb. Details from previous books which had slipped away were reinforced as I returned to Sacoridia, relishing my reunion with Karigan G’ladheon, Alton D’Yer, Estora Coutre, and others.
To Britain’s credit, the antagonists in this book are complex. None can be taken at face value, especially Grandmother, whose strange knot-magic threatens to unravel the land. While some old baddies return, new threats and situations arise, feeding off of previous conflicts while remaining innovative enough to be interesting.
The same can be said of the protagonists. Karigan displays greater strength (physical and emotional) and a harsher view of her shifting world. I never had much in common with the courageous heroine, but I like and respect her as much as ever. I particularly enjoyed Lady Estora’s development. Unlike other reviewers, I did not find her a clichéd romance heroine. She deals with issues of love and confinement, true, but does not lose her individuality. Laren Mapstone, a longtime favorite, attempts to thwart the romance between Karigan and King Zachary without coming off as callous or cruel. The ambiguous Xandis Amberhill adds spark and spice to several ladies’ lives. Yes, Britain’s characters remain strong — and for readers who, like myself, prize characterization above all else, this book is a gem.
On the downside, it takes the action a long time to heat up. Sometimes it seems that not only Alton, but every returning character is pounding on a stone wall, unable to get past it. The first 200 pages are hijacked by the newly introduced Raven Mask and Fergel. The middle is chock-full of more delicious characters and intriguing revelations, but some subplots slow the book’s momentum. Other reviewers have expressed displeasure over Rider Dale Littlepage’s numerous appearances, and I agree with them. Over a hundred pages are devoted to her, but I have little idea of who she is as a person, and I found her interactions with Alton and the tower guardians too lengthy. Britain would have done well to pare down this story line and stick more closely to what was happening to Karigan.
The best parts of this installment are its character development and its fast-paced ending. Although there is no closure on some major plotlines, which were clearly created to carry the next book as well as this one, others are resolved nicely. Karigan’s foray into the tombs with the Weapons is a tense affair that had me hooked well into the night. To conclude, despite some faults, this is an eminently enjoyable book with textured characters. Four stars.
K. Sozaeva @ 3:13 am
I have NO idea how I got the idea into my head that this story was a trilogy, but imagine my surprise when I reached the end of this volume and realized … this is NOT the end! Oh, dear me. And no sign of the next one, either. Oh, dear me … how long will we have to wait for the love triangles to un-tangle? Will young what’s-his-face overcome the training from his knacker “da” and learn to love horses again? What sort of horrible, terrible, no-good, very bad day will poor Karigan have next? Will the King go through with the marriage to Lady Estora? These are just a few of the questions that are NOT answered in this book.
Then again, that’s just the sort of thing to leave us wanting MORE!!
When Karigan is paired off with a new, young rider named Fergal and sent on a routine errand for the King, things start out badly right away. Fergal is young, impulsive and has no idea how to behave as a Rider. Plus he hates horses. To make matters worse, he decides to try to test out his “Rider magic” by throwing himself into a river and seeing if that will make it manifest. Which only serves to delay them that much more.
By the D’Yer wall, Lord Alton is slowly going insane because of his obsession with fixing the wall, and as a result he is pushing Dale – injured by a horrible avian of some kind that escaped from Blackveil forest in the 2nd book – too hard to find answers, since she CAN get into the Tower to question Merdigan, one of the minders who are supposed to assist with maintaining the wall. The wall, on the other hand, is also going insane because of the unstable element introduced by Alton’s hate-filled cousin Pendric, who gave himself to the wall in the 2nd book.
Meanwhile, up in the mountains, a group of people descended from Mornhaven the Black’s followers plot to bring down Sacoridia with the help of Grandmother, a kindly older woman who can do … REALLY NASTY things with magic.
I may sound like I’m being a bit sarcastic here, and it is true that it seems that each book tries to one-up the other in ways of punishing Karigan – this one, with her having to ride Salvistar, the horse of their death God, is particularly stringent, since she believes she’ll probably end up dead herself from doing so – and, as well, amplifying her power. Nonetheless, this is a very well-created fantasy world and each book builds upon the others nicely, creating a finely-crafted plot and revealing intricacies and layers like peeling an onion as the reader continues. I know I will certainly be watching for more books from this very talented author.
Marikris @ 5:46 am
Two hours ago, I had a headache blooming. I had started the book early today and, though I hadn’t reread the earlier novels, I was caught up in the blossoming story, waiting for more of the Karigan love story subplot.
**May be some spoilers after this point**
Then around page 200, the narrative started to crawl. The view points were too spread out between the main characters and, instead of fleshing them out, just simply detracted from the story. I didn’t feel that Estora was any more realized at the end of the book than at the beginning. I didn’t think Amberhill, since he was given some writing time to begin with, was given enough time to shine. Fergal, Dale – just some more examples of yet more characters popping up with their own side-stories. And though Karigan is the protagonist, there was not enough writing dedicated to her. It was kind of frustrating.
There were also parts that *really* should have been chucked or glossed over. Karigan’s whole conversations with Estral and her friends at the school accomplished nothing but to ask Karigan what had been happening in her life since previous novels. I even dreaded every time the perspective went back to Alton at the wall which, when he still accomplished nothing, only served to dwell on his lack of progress.
My headache started to wear off by page 400 when action started to pick up again. I was happy to find some resolution at the end (there were some things that were also introduced at the end for the next novel to deal with), though unsatisfied with some of the major issues I really cared about (namely the love story aspect that really did not *at all* move along). Hopefully the following books will be more cohesive and less cluttered with side-stories that in no way help the book move forward or develop the characters.
*from my blog at http://www.marikris.com