Reviews for Cast in Shadow

The average rating for Cast in Shadow based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-09-24 00:00:00 Garrison Nutt Elianne was an orphaned child of the fiefs, scraping out a living in the fiefdom of Nightshade with an older boy, Severn, and two other little girls. Then one day strange markings appeared on her arms and legs, and the killings began. Thirty-eight children are found murdered with markings like hers carved into their skin - and she knew all of them - until they suddenly stopped the same day she ran away from the fiefs, from Severn, from the horror of what she'd seen. Now, seven years later, her name has changed to Kaylin and she's a member of the Hawks, one of the three Lords of Law of the city of Elantra. She practices her healing magic in secret and under the protection of the Hawklord, a rare magic that would see her sent to the Emperor if it were discovered. But the killings have started again, closer together this time, and the Hawklord has put her on the case. He's teamed her with a Dragon, Tiamaris, and Severn, who's transferred from the Wolves. It's an uneasy alliance between Kaylin and Severn. To complicate matters, the Lord of Nightshade has marked her, and the marks on her body are changing again. To find the source of the kidnappings and ritualistic killings, Kaylin must understand what is happening to her and what the connection is, before more children she personally knows are taken. This is a book I wanted to throw at the wall every second sentence. And rip into bits. I started reading it late last year and only now decided I should finish it - all the time with a frown on my face. The only reason it gets two stars is because the plot is actually very intriguing. There are seven races in Elantra: the immortal Dragons, including the Emperor, and the austere, magical Barrani; the winged Aerians, the snarling Leontines, the telepathic Tha'alani, humans and one other that's not revealed apart from a brief aside about their agoraphobia. It's quite the busy patchwork, and a world that you're launched into suddenly. This has always been something I've appreciated in fantasy, because it makes the world feel more real and accepted, like it's always been there and you're just late to the party - but, as with everything in this book, the writing style is so atrociously bad that it spoils everything. Written in the third person but almost always from Kaylin's point of view, it has a modern, "sassy" voice and tries to be smart. Even though it's not technically Kaylin's voice, it is her voice, and it gets very annoying very quickly. The book is littered with those "climactic" stand-alone sentences that always lose their impact by being constantly used - something that made me put down the third Kushiel book before finishing it, though Jacqueline Carey wasn't half as bad as Sagara. Not only that - as if that weren't enough - very little actually makes sense. It is full of these little quippy sentences that are supposed to be meaningful - are written with meaning and intent, it's obvious - but mean nothing because they just don't make sense. Which means a great deal of the plot and motivations and characters don't make sense either. There are so many little mysteries, things alluded to but kept secret in some kind of attempt to keep tension and the reader's interest - it was complete overkill and drove me mental. Sometimes you can't even tell who's speaking, or who's present in a scene, because Sagara doesn't tell us and it's impossible to guess - when their name suddenly appears, you have to backtrack and correct your mental image of what's just been happening in order to include them. The style is very obtuse, deliberately mysterious in the worst possible way, vague at the best of times and confusing at others. Sentences often lack connections to the sentences before and after them - these ones are written to sound profound but if they lack context or relevance they're just dead space. Conversations are just as obtuse, the dialogue meant to be realistic but instead creating bigger and bigger gaps and more and more confusion. And it makes me want to scream, how many times the characters around Kaylin act all mysterious and won't answer questions, or give answers that make no sense. I know I should highlight the positives after ranting on about the bad, bad writing - but I've already mentioned the positive: the overall storyline. Oh, and the Lord of Nightshade, I liked him. He had an excuse to be enigmatic! For the sake of those two elements, I've given it two stars. Otherwise, I nearly hated it. I haven't read any of her other books (she publishes under this name, under Michelle West and Michelle Sagara West as well), but if the writing's anything like this, I'm not inclined to. The thing is, I bought the next book, Cast in Courtlight, first without realising it wasn't the first book, so I suppose I should read it since I have it. Seriously, though, this book came so close to being shredded to bits, which is saying something from someone who doesn't even like to dogear the pages.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-11-18 00:00:00 Renn Newwer [dragons!!! (hide spoiler)]