Treason Keep

Read for the Women of Genre Fiction Reading Challenge and the High Fantasy Reading Challenge.

Okay, this book was definitely not my favourite. Mostly I found it frustrating. I found myself skimming through the last half of it to see if it improved and to find out how particular events turned out, but in general I found myself just annoyed.

If you've read my review of the first book in this series, Medalon, you'll find I had some significant critiques. All of those critiques still stand, and indeed, in many cases have worsened. Fallon's politics make little sense and her understanding of war is, not to put too fine a point on it, abysmal. Why in the name of all that is stupid would an army try to defend an almost indefensible plain with no settlements on it save an old ruin whose existence makes little sense in the first place, just because it's the northern border of the country? If there were farms there I could understand it, but there weren't. This was the strategy of the most highly-trained and highly-disciplined army in the known world? Nobody has ever been this stupid.

Now, I could forgive a complete lack of common sense when it comes to the art of war if the relationships and characters were absorbing. Mercedes Lackey often has this flaw, which is why she often skips the battle scenes, but that's okay because her characters are interesting and it's often as much about how the characters act and react as it is about the events as they unfold. There's nothing wrong with that. But even here, Fallon fails, in my opinion, to deliver.

First of all, I hate her characters. I think every single one of them is annoying and utterly unlikable, except possibly Tarja, who is mostly wooden. She even introduced new characters - scions of the royal families of the two nearby polytheist nations that are peripherally involved in the struggle between atheist Medalon and monotheist Karien - and if anything, I liked them less than the original protagonists. They're stock characters from bad romance novels. He's the rude jerk warlord barbarian type and she's the spoiled brat princess harridan. I would be delighted if they both were murdered in their sleep so I don't have to hear about either one of them anymore. If you're going to write bad romance novels, please at least write us some interesting sex scenes so we have something to entertain ourselves with. But no; all sex scenes faded to black as they got started, though, unfortunately, the torture and rape scenes didn't. I don't eschew violence in a story if that's where the story needs to go, and I won't turn my face from it when it happens, but in my opinion, this continual cycle fails to add anything at all to the plot.

Second, her monotheists were unrelievedly bad. There's not a single likable one among them, except maybe the little boy who was raised in their ways who has a change of heart by the end of the book, and even his self-righteousness is annoying; you just have pity for it because he's a little boy. Their religion is every Pagan stereotype of Christianity you've ever heard; it's oppressive, especially to women; self-righteous; sexually repressive; arrogant; ruled by arrogant jerk high priests who set themselves above everybody else; and even the clothing worn by its adherents are drab and boring. I cannot imagine why anyone would follow this faith, and its existence is supposed to be relatively new. How did such a bunch of a**holes win an entire nation of converts?

But perhaps the answer to that is that the only decent god among the gods portrayed as characters appears to be the God of Thieves. The Goddess of Love is just annoying and I sincerely hope that after the crap he's put her through, R'shiel murders the God of War in a great deal of pain.

Not to mention that it doesn't seem to matter what the characters do at all. Events are just going to play out the way that Fate wants them to, regardless of how smart or how stupid their plans are. If I had a Dungeon Master like this, I would quit the game, because why even bother trying? The only relevant factor appears to be how much pain R'shiel can endure without turning into a raging psychopath. I suppose Fallon thinks this is "edgy," but you know, things even go well for the Starks in Game of Thrones every once in a while, and what they choose to do has an effect of some kind on the outcome of events, for good or ill.

And on top of it all, while I do see that part of what she's trying to accomplish as a writer is to show that one's personal narrative of an event can colour what you see in a way that is not accurate (and, to be fair, that's actually well done when looking through the eyes of the boy and when comparing some of the different beliefs of the major characters,) I am getting really tired of everyone in the book telling me how manipulative and calculating, how clever and dangerous, R'shiel is, when I see absolutely no sign of any of that. Since she keeps blustering on into impossible situations that just get her repeatedly captured, then rescued by whatever man of the hour or deus ex machina Fallon decides on this week, I see her mostly as a stubborn, if brave, idiot. And if she really were conniving and manipulative, wouldn't everyone think she was wonderful, instead of hating her but trying to save her for their own purposes anyway? The only one who actually gives a damn about her at all is Tarja, and he was point blank enspelled into falling in love with her thanks to the heavy hand of the Goddess of Love (and the author). People who are good at being manipulative make you believe that they're wonderful people, don't they? Isn't that why they're dangerous? R'shiel seems to have no ability to make even a housecat like her.

I kept hoping it would improve, or that some of the random bullpucky that she throws in there - like this random ruined keep in the middle of an indefensible plain - would be explained; but no. And because I don't like the characters and nothing they do seems to affect the outcome, I no longer give a fig what happens to them or how the story ends. I won't be looking for the third book in the trilogy and I'll be taking the first two back to the bookstore to trade in. I have lost all suspension of disbelief and I feel like my time has been wasted. And it's sad, because I thought the premise was awesome and I really, really wanted to like it.

But if you're going to write romance novels that are full of romance novel tropes, first of all, don't pretend they are fantasy - paranormal romance is a perfectly legitimate genre and one of my guilty pleasures. Also, if you're going to do that, write more sex and less abuse, please.