First of all, I have to thank Lady B on the Melanie Rawn boards for sharing my last review! That was very sweet and much unexpected! I woke up this morning and checked my page views and nearly had an aneurysm when I saw how high they were: "What? 57 people looked at my blog? Where the hell did they come from?!" I, being accustomed to the 4 people who read my blog on any kind of regular basis, my roommate, my best friend, my college buddy, and my cousin. So thanks, to any new readers! I hope you enjoy my reviews!
I thought, since I had a few more books stored up, ready to review, that I would just get another one out there. (Really I'm bored and have nothing better to do. Indulge me.)
Image courtesy of Melanie Rawn's website: http://bb.melanierawn.com/.
Links to my other Melanie Rawn reviews:
If you read my last blog post, you may guess that "the Mageborn Traitor" is a sequel to "Ruins of Ambrai." Indeed, the much awaited sequel to the first book.
Here's a quick summary in my own words: In "the Mageborn Traitor," readers find the land of Lenfell undergoing a lot of change. With the resistance fully successful and new leaders in the government, a lot of reform is being made of old tradition, creating enemies and new friends for the main instigator, Sarra, and her sister Cailet, the leader of the Mages. Meanwhile, their other sister, Glenin, forced to hide in the shadows, leads the opposing faction of mageborns, the Malerissi, and waits for the perfect moment to take down her sisters.
So, as that summary suggests, it's pretty intense! I enjoy this novel a lot, though not as much as the first in the series. Rawn's structure, again, is very sound with clear sections of the novel and I appreciate that Rawn still--though having set some characters against each other--still presents the antagonist to us in a really honest way; she doesn't go overboard on trying to make the antagonist as evil as possible, but lets it happen very naturally.
Upsides: The usual for Rawn--very vivid characters, fantastically natural dialogue, nothing seems contrived or forced; obviously all good qualities in a novel. What I really love about Rawn books is that she always takes on a social issue and just tackles it. While sort of touching on gender rights in the first book, Rawn takes them on full-force in the second book, dealing especially with domestic violence. For one, taking on issues like that is brave as sometimes authors can be seen as "preachy" if they do so, but having one of the main characters--Sarra--deeply involved in government gave her an outlet for the issue and it was approached really well. So kudos to her on that.
Downsides: I always struggle to find downsides for Rawn books. I'll say this, that while I don't think this is a downside per say, I think this is something readers may struggle with: the death of secondary characters that you really get attached to and that you think you're going to get to know a lot better. It happens, it sucks, it makes a reader sad. There are some secondary characters I would have liked to see more of in the novel, both that live and die (and I'm not saying which these do): I wanted to see more of Aidan, of Imi Gorrst, who is an active character in the first book, and barely comes into the second book. There was also a section where we got a summary of how Cailet built her Academy and I actually would have liked a bit more of in-depth information about how it was built, and how the villages reacted--just more detail overall. However, the book is pretty long--800+ pages, so naturally you have to skimp on some things to keep other, much more important things in.
Overall rating: 5/5 Everything readers were promised in the first novel comes through in the second. It's thoroughly enjoyable and definitely a page turner in the last 1/3rd of the book. I naturally highly recommend it! Now go out and buy this series!
Happy reading!
AJ
PS. Next time: Margaret Atwood's "the Handmaid's Tale"--be on the lookout!
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