Lackey's Foundation series (Valdemar books)

[vom_marlowe]

There are at least four books in this series.  It follows the adventures of Mags, an orphan raised in a gem mine, who becomes a Herald during the time that the Heralds of Valdemar switch from being trained by individual mentors (as in Vanyel's day) to becoming trained in a Heraldic Collegium, as in Talia's day.

So far there are three books:

Comments

[buymeaclue]

Have you ever posted your thoughts on the Vanyel books? I'd love to hear them.

[vom_marlowe]

I don't think I've ever really written a formal post about it, no....

I should do that when I'm through the current reread!

[telophase]

Her upper-class=bad, lower-class=good bias drives me nuts. Which is a sentence I feel a bit odd writing, but she uses it as a shortcut instead of characterization, lumping highborns together into the Mean Girls from Highschool, with only a few exceptions.

She's very good at the social dynamics of high school from the outcast's perspective, which is one of the reasons why her work speaks to so many, I think - and why I pick it up and keep reading, despite howling out loud at all the gaffes and blunders I see in the writing.

And yes, Mags' written dialect is shudder-worthy.

[vom_marlowe]

Yeah--it's annoying. The Talia books are the worst for it, I think. I recently reread the Elspeth books and actually quite enjoyed how her attitudes and changes are portrayed, as opposed to when I was younger and thought Elspeth was just an arrogant jerk. Heh.

I so wish she'd get a better copyeditor, honestly. The random italics give me an eye twitch and always have.

[telophase]

I think she's not too good at nuanced characters, so that they're unambiguously good or bad and feel kind of flat. and did you get the feeling that this series was mostly "stuff happens and fifty pages from the end the author realizes that plot needs to happen"? Not that I have much against a slice-of-life story, but the rush of plot near the end feels unbalanced.

When you start selling too well, you end up in the Editing Twilight Zone: your stuff will sell anyway, so they don't need to spend as much time and money editing, and/or you can get away with turning manuscripts in late and the book's already been announced, so the editing gets short shrift. I suspect either or both have happened to her.