Mercedes Lackey: Reserved for the Cat

[kyrielle]

The latest in the Elemental Masters series, which I can't seem to stop reading no matter how bad they get. (There are a couple in this world that I think are incredibly good. Since then, they have been slowly subsiding into a pit that appears to have no bottom.)

Here is my main review, in one sentence: Even for Lackey, this is awful.

Also, this paragraph is proof that an editor never read this far. "The streets were dark and quiet, even here in the theater district. They were, however, very well lit - it was bad for business if your customers fell and broke a limb on the way to the theater, and worse for them to be the victim of a cutpurse or a felon."

This is not to say it didn't have some good lines, but the pain of getting to them? So not really worth it.

Comments

[tiassa]

Thanks for the warning...I'm having pretty much the same problem with that series, I like the setting and keep hoping that the next one will actually be worth reading. :P

[kyrielle]

I cannot explain the horror that is this book without spoilering it from here to tomorrow. My post does not do it justice. Hopefully the Dormouse (who indicated she wasn't going to read it, and thus got ranted at with each new and less-plausible turn) will jump in and comment. Or not.

This one SUCKS. The heroine sucks. The heroes suck. The plot sucks. The pacing sucks. The continuity sucks. I had to make up my own explanation for why something that shouldn't have worked did at one point. (Otherwise, our heroine should have died. Dead. Gone. Which actually might have gotten us out of this awful book a little sooner.)

This is worse than The Wizard of London by an order of magnitude. It is AWFUL.

[tiassa]

...worse than Wizard of London?

Augh.

Seriously, someone needs to stop publishing this woman's books, for the good of humanity.

[kyrielle]

Nooooooooooooo. Because some of her books, a very few, still rock. Especially if James Mallory is the co-author.

What they do need to do is get over their infatuation with her Name and recognize that she needs to be edited as if she were the least member of the slushpile, and her manuscripts rejected just as freely until she actually begins to write to a decent standard again, instead of churning them out as fast as she can.

Not that THAT will ever happen.

[tiassa]

I don't think I've ever read anything she wrote with him...

As for making her actually write quality stuff...heh. Yeah. Not going to happen. Just look at Anne McCaffrey's later stuff. :P

[kyrielle]

The Obsidian Trilogy is by both of them: The Outstretched Shadow, To Light a Candle, When Darkness Falls. If you like the first one, you'll probably enjoy the series; if not, I'd give the other two a miss.

There's a sequel trilogy, The Enduring Flame, in which only the first book is now out; that's The Phoenix Unchained. I liked it; I think it, like the first trilogy, will be enjoyable if you liked the first trilogy and otherwise not. TEF is set about a thousand years after TOT, and it DOES spoiler it. It also is hysterically fun at times because they actually let the events of the previous series become legend in that time. So what the main characters of TEF know about the main characters of TOT ... the ones that remained in memory, anyway ... is hysterical. And wrong. And hysterical.

[kyrielle]

Also, in between the pain, the cliches, they will burn your eyes.

[tiassa]

I think that at the point when she wrote herself into the books as a love interest for a main character she not only jumped the shark, she jumped the entire freakin' aquarium.

Seriously, her books are just published fanfic. :P

[kyrielle]

Yep. And there's unpublished fanfic that deserves publication more than most of hers. :P

[phoenixscribe.livejournal.com]

WTF??? Either an editor never read that far, or they were paying so much attention to trying to catch the intelligence that was pouring out of their head at attempting to read Lackey that they were not much more than an animated zombie at that point.

[kyrielle]

*dies* *adores you*

THANK YOU.

Not the worst sin in the book, either. But the most screamingly obvious.

I figured, when I read it, that she'd said one of the two and then realized she needed the other light level for that scene.

But no! I read on and it NEVER MATTERED TO THE SCENE WHAT THE STUPID LIGHT LEVEL WAS.

[phoenixscribe.livejournal.com]

Oh, now that's too much. If either of those things were important to the scene, or to setting the mood, fine. But to contradict oneself and then not have it matter???????????

I'm having vivid memories of why I stopped reading Lackey.

[kyrielle]

Oh wait, I've got it!!!

It is BRITISH usage. The streets are not well-lighted, they are thoroughly inebriated!

*innocent*

[phoenixscribe.livejournal.com]

Nah, she was saying that the streets FELT dark and foreboding, but that the lights were on. Which is to say, that there was more intelligence in the streets themselves than in her book.

Oh, and I forgot that foreboding has more letters than she's allowed to use in one word.

[kyrielle]

*laughs helplessly and applauds*

[kyrielle]

Or maybe she just meant the literal streets were dark. That new-fangled tar paving, you know.

*giggles*

[phoenixscribe.livejournal.com]

Ah, dark surfaces with light above. No wonder nobody wanted to walk the streets without light! They'd fall all the time!

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

The only even vaguely plausible explanation is that she meant 'dark' in a 'all the stores are closed and the lights are off in most of the buildings' kind of way.

But that is prodding and pulling and twisting until I get to a reasonable meaning.

[kyrielle]

Hm. That may be what she was thinking, though. It comforts me to think there was an intent that wasn't insane even if the resulting paragraph was.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I have nothing to say. I read the dust jacket flap in the store and walked away, and my opinion of Lackey is low enough that nothing I was told about it surprised me.

I gotta tell you guys, though. . . if you aren't going to read this, find kyrielle online and poke her. The flailing is hysterical.

signed, the Dormouse (who is utterly heartless because it's LACKEY)

[kyrielle]

Honestly, the ability to flail at you about it was one of the more entertaining parts of the book.

I had FUN flailing at the stupid.

[jenett]

I have it on hold in the library, because of the same forlorn hope. (There's a point in Phoenix and Ashes where I wanted to hurl the thing across the room for purely religious logic reasons.)

I will likely still read it, mostly because .. erm. Completist about some things. I wish she'd gone further with developing some of the stuff in the first two. In sane ways.

[kyrielle]

YES.

Keep your sense of humor about you as you read this one. It helps. Mocking it to dormouse_in_tea made it much more enjoyable.