Really more like 2.5 stars. So, Lois McMaster Bujold hath a blog, or more accurately, a MySpace page. One of the latest things posted on it was a recommendation of her friend Sylvia Kelso's new book, Everran's Bane. The library had it, so I requested it, and took it with me on a recent trip. It's ... hmm. It was adequately readable but there were things I didn't like. Parts of the worldbuilding didn't feel very deep. (There were generic Norse-alikes. And there was a culture that was run by corrupt trade unions, and another with a major media obsession. The narrator spends a bunch of time being exasperated with them for not being his home culture, and all in all it feels sort of anachronistic and somewhat drags the reader out of the setting.)Kelso made up a bunch of words for various magical techniques, which were somewhat confusing. And she made her viewpoint character able to hear the mental speech the wizards used, but with no real explanation why. I suppose she went that route to avoid having him and thus the reader in the dark, but he could have watched their expressions or been spoken aloud to some of the time.The basic storyline of the book was actually kind of nifty, even if the ending was improbable. The king's storyline was sort of like a weird inversion of The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. The ending is mostly a stereotypically happy one for the viewpoint character, if a sort of improbable one. In general, I'd file this under "good idea, implementation not as good." There were times when the pace felt slow, and I just didn't really get a very strong sense of dramatic tension from the story.
