Reading roundup

[hamsterwoman]

Still on a reading kick, as a means of not thinking about all the other crap.

24. Cinda Williams Chima, The Warrior Heir -- This was a random YA book I picked up just because I felt like some YA fantasy, and I was actually pleasantly surprised (although, admittedly, my expectations going in were pretty low).

Comments

[_grayswandir_]

My favorite part, and what elevated this book for me above other stand-alone Zelaznys I've read, were the characters.

They were certainly better than most of Zelanzy's non-Amberites, though I still thought they left something to be desired. Sam was okay, but struck me as being a somewhat too-typical reluctant hero: powerful, just, capable, perhaps nearly divine, but still humble and too wise to really consider himself godlike. In a way, I suppose he was more believable than Corwin, being more powerful but not quite so impossibly rugged and charming; but then, Corwin's very arrogance and grating self-applause gave him a certain believability, a certain humanity, that I think Sam lacked.

I don't know, he was just sort of irritatingly... plebeian, with all the smoking and idiomatic banter. Which I suppose was appropriate, and it certainly fits that the gods should be more vexed with his plebeianism than even with his defiance, desiring that someone so powerful should join ranks with them rather than with the... unwashed masses, as it were. I do approve of Sam as a character. I just didn't really like him, at least not as much as I think he was meant to be liked.

Tak had a similar problem. He was so storybook charming, a princeling cast in the wrong form, gallant and humble; a man of mighty lineage but without any ambitions or pretensions to personal greatness. Sure, he had flaws, but they were all such appealing flaws. Well, except for being a monkey. That helped a bit.

Most of the other characters I didn't notice too much. I'm always amused by Zelazny's rampant, unrepentant, almost absentminded chauvinism -- the way Kali, for all her terrible power, still apparently desires to bed all the heroes one by one; and the way she has to be practically carried out of Hellwell by Yama after she's injured. The way Ratri, for all her power, is so easily moved to tears by the memory of her lost beauty, of a dance in the arms of a man. Heh. And then there's Brahma, another Zelaznian dame, but cast in a man's body -- still hampered by the weakness and vanity of his real sex. I did like Yama/Kali, though. They were... strangely adorable.

The other gods just seemed to be characterized by their Aspects/Attributes (I never did figure out which was which), without much personal development at all. Nirriti was an interesting idea, and yes, totally XD at the chaplain and his army of Christian zombies. Oy, Zelazny, you unsubtle man. I really, really would have liked some more development for Nirriti; he felt sort of tacked-on at the end there.

Rild... I don't know, something about his submission struck me as less than genuine -- a kind of defeated prostration that takes on the aspect of love/belief because it has no other choice. After all, Sam had spared his life. He had this Saul of Tarsus sort of thing going on, changing sides all at once, completely, after a revelation, and then becoming a prophet himself. I couldn't quite buy that it was real.

But! Yama-Dharma. Dude. (See next comment.)