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E. Kimble's Reviews > The Fall of the Kings
The Fall of the Kings (Riverside, #3)
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This was a frustrating one! I love little more than academia in a fantasy setting, and a climactic sequence begun by a scholarly debate is sooo up my street--but what dreadful pacing it turned out to have. This book takes a pleasant road but a slow one towards its destination, and when you finally reach the book's pivotal moment it's so rushed that it's robbed of all its power. The relationship between the two leads gets so much focus, only to have its purpose shoved from "character development" to "ritual plot point" right out of give-a-damn territory.
Which is an awful shame, because I really enjoyed their chemistry for a while. I found Basil a far more engaging protagonist than Theron, though, and then Basil wandered offscreen to accomplish things without any visible effort leaving Theron the only one with a half-decent attempt at a real arc. Sigh.
Uh, also, this book sure did have a lot of dudes in it. The second half of the book does at last yield up some Women Who Actually Affect Anything That Happens, but it takes its sweet time getting there, and populates its minor cast almost entirely by men. All the significant relationships (except Theron and his sister, and that's only introduced in the book's last...eighth or so), platonic and romantic, are between men; the University's only got men in it; the minor female characters are either relatives of Theron or paraded before Theron as potential wives. ??? It was distracting!
Eeeeespecially in a society that seemed to have obligingly accepted all varieties of sexual orientation quite some time ago...it felt almost like an ornamental patriarchy. The book was more or less brushing women off to the side so it could embrace its hypermasculine hunter/hunted ritual motifs, and magic explicitly born of a bond between men. It felt less like feminism fail and more like fetish indulgence in the end, which is...fair enough, I suppose. xD They just could have done with a little more tightening up on the worldbuilding end so it didn't feel like the whole setting was in the service of "dude, that's hot."
Which is an awful shame, because I really enjoyed their chemistry for a while. I found Basil a far more engaging protagonist than Theron, though, and then Basil wandered offscreen to accomplish things without any visible effort leaving Theron the only one with a half-decent attempt at a real arc. Sigh.
Uh, also, this book sure did have a lot of dudes in it. The second half of the book does at last yield up some Women Who Actually Affect Anything That Happens, but it takes its sweet time getting there, and populates its minor cast almost entirely by men. All the significant relationships (except Theron and his sister, and that's only introduced in the book's last...eighth or so), platonic and romantic, are between men; the University's only got men in it; the minor female characters are either relatives of Theron or paraded before Theron as potential wives. ??? It was distracting!
Eeeeespecially in a society that seemed to have obligingly accepted all varieties of sexual orientation quite some time ago...it felt almost like an ornamental patriarchy. The book was more or less brushing women off to the side so it could embrace its hypermasculine hunter/hunted ritual motifs, and magic explicitly born of a bond between men. It felt less like feminism fail and more like fetish indulgence in the end, which is...fair enough, I suppose. xD They just could have done with a little more tightening up on the worldbuilding end so it didn't feel like the whole setting was in the service of "dude, that's hot."
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Reading Progress
Finished Reading
March 10, 2013
– Shelved
