An oldie but a goodie. Read these back in high school, and decided to pick it back up. It starts a little slow, and it's fairly simplistic (no crazy twists, very straight forward), but there's something very satisfying about the story as it unfolds. ( )

Meh. The world and magic system are interesting, but the plot itself was underwhelming, and I found it difficult to relate to the characters. I doubt I'll read any further in the series. ( )

This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Kirby Heyborne. He wasn’t a favorite, but I think most of my issues with him had more to do with the text than with his narration. The main character is whiny, and Heyborne didn’t over dramatize that, but his voice definitely “enhanced” the whininess. I’m not sure I would have liked the character any more in print, but it was even more annoying to listen to him in audio.

I think the text must also have had a lot of spelled-out sound effects, because the narrator was constantly whinnying and making bird noises and crack, whoosh, etc. noises. His whinnying was quite convincing, at least to a person like me who has had minimal exposure to real live horses, but it was kind of startling when he would suddenly whinny out of nowhere. The bird noises got even more annoying. With some of the other sound effects, I often didn’t know what they meant until the subsequent text explained them, so it was just an annoyance that didn’t add anything.

He differentiated voices pretty well, so I didn’t have any issues on that score, and I thought he did well with female characters. My one complaint was with a male character whom he voiced like a female character. I don’t remember anything in the text, like mention of a girly voice, that would have given a reason for it. He wasn’t in the story that much though.

Story
The story focuses on Lerris, a young man from an isolated place called Recluce who lacks interest in learning marketable skills and is too restless to give anything the attention necessary to succeed. Recluce has a solution for people like him. They send them off on a “dangergeld” which is basically an ambiguous and unclear quest to go out into the real world and figure stuff out. In the process, he learns about order magic and chaos magic and gets bored a lot.

I got so sick of Lerris whining. Everything was boring to him, and I got bored listening to how bored he was. He constantly complained about not being given answers. The withholding of information for no good reason is a plot trope that annoys me, so I was annoyed both by that and by his complaining about it. Additionally, there were things he didn’t know that it made absolutely no sense for him not to know, considering everybody else from Recluce seemed to know it.

I also got annoyed, especially in the early half, with how Lerris would never take any initiative. He wanted everything to be spoon fed to him. He had a book that could have answered a lot of his questions and taught him things he needed to know, but he ignored it for weeks (months?). He reminded me of people I’ve worked with who were equally unwilling to research, analyze, and experiment in order to truly understand how to do their own job, using me as their auxiliary brain and their personal search engine. (The best is when you have to Google something to find readily available information and then use that info to teach somebody from another department how to do their job…!) So yeah, Lerris pushed a few buttons and made me want to punch the computer through which he was speaking. I restrained myself, if only because I knew I’d need that computer to rant and rave about him later.

He did get better later in the book, maybe around the second half or later, once he got out into the real world and started thinking about people other than himself. From that point the story was easier to listen to, but I also didn’t care that much about the character or his story by that point so it still didn’t hold my attention very well. And most of his successes seemed to be as much from luck as anything. I also never felt like I really understood why Lerris did some of the things he did. I don’t know if I was just missing some of the details because I wasn’t sufficiently engaged in the story, or if the necessary details were really missing. Maybe a combination of the two.

I’m rating it at 2.5 stars but rounding up to 3 on Goodreads. I’m not sure whether I’ll ever revisit this series in print. I didn’t hate it despite all my complaints. It had some potential, and I suspect it would be less annoying in print without all the whinnying and shrieking sound effects. Also, if the series continues to focus on Lerris, then maybe he’ll be less annoying in future books now that he’s grown up a bit. Even so, it’s also a really long series, I think 22 books and counting, and right now I can’t fathom the idea of reading 22+ books like this. ( )

The first in a series about the battle between two opposing forces: chaos and order. Recluce is a city of almost pure order, where people who compromise that order are exiled. The main character, Lerris, is dissatisfied with never getting straight answers and hopelessly bored. I was reminded a bit of Milo from A Phantom Tollbooth. such a person. But, like any good heroic fantasy, this reluctant, unlikely hero does save the day.

The book started very slowly, until Lerris is sent for training, where Modesitt started the world building. His magic system was unorthodox: black wizards are good and white wizards are evil, for example. Once Lerris got settled, the pacing improved. ( )

Stopped reading after about 2 hours of listening to the Audible version (he was doing a great job--I could tell who the characters were from the voices), primarily because it wasn't holding my interest and I know there are other books out there.

Right now Lerris is essentially at Dangergeld school, but instead of school being interesting, or mentioned as an aside to more exciting topics, or dealt with in a sentence (e.g. "and after five years had learned all they had to teach him"), no, we're getting lectures. Lots of specific lectures. Detailed lectures. And if Lerris dares breathe funny, the lecturers will say things like "No, you don't understand" and then repeat the lecture.

If I have to learn something, I'd rather learn Japanese, or macrame, not the complicated ethics of a magic system in an imaginary place. This is still supposed to be entertainment! So I'm out.

I also tend to have limited love for large, sprawling epics encompassing dozens of books and 20 times that many place names and 50 times that many characters, so I shall cut my losses quickly and move on. I love fantasy (The Last Unicorn, The Lies of Locke Lamora, Howl's Moving Castle), but not this kind, I guess (I'm similarly unenthralled by the works of Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, etc.).

(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s). I feel a lot of readers automatically render any book they enjoy 5, but I grade on a curve!

( )