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hopeevey's review
4.0
Good action story with deep characters and very engagingly written. It was hard to put down.
jaxcatx's review
1.0
This book started out SO good, had so much potential, and to be honest, the actual story isn't that bad but fuck is the dialogue awful. And the one female character is so one-note, she may as well have been a stick figure. maybe she was.
So i got about 60% of the way through, which is about 20% more than I wanted to read but I was determined to continue, obviously it got so .... cheesy, kinda cliche, that I just couldn't read further.
I'm not going to judge Zelazny on this title alone, I'll check out the Amber series but this is pretty fucking awful.
Like, seriously Pol, you literally had to do nothing. You arrive at the magic world and you just know magic, there was no fight for it, i think he may have read a single book, but it was just too easy for him. And where did Mark get all that technology? how was he shocked at photographs when he CREATED a video camera? HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?
argh.
anyway.
So i got about 60% of the way through, which is about 20% more than I wanted to read but I was determined to continue, obviously it got so .... cheesy, kinda cliche, that I just couldn't read further.
I'm not going to judge Zelazny on this title alone, I'll check out the Amber series but this is pretty fucking awful.
Like, seriously Pol, you literally had to do nothing. You arrive at the magic world and you just know magic, there was no fight for it, i think he may have read a single book, but it was just too easy for him. And where did Mark get all that technology? how was he shocked at photographs when he CREATED a video camera? HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?
argh.
anyway.
arbieroo's review
3.0
This is one of Zelazny's openly comic efforts, poking some fun at fantasy novel cliches but also showing a number of more serious themes that will be familiar to readers who have read Zelazny more widely than just the Amber series. For example, opposites seperated and in tension (magic and technology, as in Jack of Shadows) and arch-villians who don't start off intrinsically evil. The latter is perhaps the more interesting in this case; the development from mis-understood well-meaning kid genius to megalomaniac adult is very convincingly handled and not something generally tackled in high fantasy. This also might seem familiar from Jack of Shadows, but this time there is a seperate protagonist who contrasts the eventual antagonist in many ways.
It's a fun read and neither the best nor the worst of Zelazny.
It's a fun read and neither the best nor the worst of Zelazny.
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