Dear Ms Vaughan,
Enough with the Sweat! Enough with the fever, raving, bathing and sickness. Give us more pattern dancing and combat trials. More fun and less grim. And please make Lara less of a little martyr who feels compelled to help even her enemies. I wanna see her kick Iften’s ass.
And as much as I like Keir too, he’s almost too good to be true. Sure he snores a little but most of the time he’s so perfect and attentive to whiny Lara that I sorta started to see him as a Ken doll.
But I do give you points for being willing to kill off a few main characters. Cruel, yes, but far more realistic than the miraculous recoveries of most romance secondary characters.
I’m psyched for book three and pissed that I have to wait another year. Write faster! B
Oh, and can you tell me why Keir is described as having dark hair yet the man on the cover appears to be a blond? Is that Iften the Asshole?
~Jayne
I liked Warprize, but Warsworn is boring. I keep picking it up and putting it down. Lara, who was okay in the first book, is irritating the hell out of me in this book. Whiney, know-it-all, verging on TSTL. I’ve stopped reading about midway through and she’s still recovering from The Sweat –I’m wishing that her bodyguard had slit her throat the way she begged. Yeah, it would’ve brought the series to a quick halt, but I’d have been put out of my misery. Can I hope that the book will improve?
Love the website!
~jmc
Hmmm, yes it does pick up but you need to wade through (or skip) the next 2 chapters. Mainly they’re just Lara and Gils working themselves to the bone to treat the warriors after the Sweat strikes the Firelander camp. Keir rides around being a Presence to rally the troops and keep them on his side while Iften snarls and plots against him. Then Keir gets the Sweat and Lara really whines at herself. Oh, and everyone learns chess.
Things pick back up around chapter 12 (though it does start with Lara throwing herself a pity party).
I have a theory that the reason I couldn’t get past about the fourth chapter of this one is that the limited third isn’t working for me in quite the same way it did in the first. Like at all. :(
I would love to have seen Keir’s POV at some point. Wouldn’t it be nice if that’s how Vaughan is going to write “Warlord?”
Oh, yes. Put it this way, having finished it, was there truly any reason not to have had his pov in Warsworn? Meaning, was there something major that needed to be hidden?
Heck, I couldn’t find anything. Unlike Warprize when the nature of a warprize needed to be hidden for a while.
But despite all my grumbling, I do agree with Jane that Vaughan has developed a nice world here (even if she does slip up and use the term “earth” once or twice). Or is this supposed to earth somewhere at some distant (or future) time?
I never even thought about why the first person narrator was used. I am so used to reading chick lit and paranormals that are told in the first person that it never occurred to me to question it. You are right, of course, that very little is gained by telling the story in the first person.
There’s another book I need to post a review on that is 3rd POV of the heroine with no POV of the hero at all. At the end, I could see why the author did it but still, I like
a hero POV.
All in all, it really surprised me by how quickly and strongly I lost interest in Warsworn. It’s not that it’s a bad story either but I just realized very quickly that the longer it went without seeing into Keir’s head, anybody else’s head really, the more twitchy I got. Very weird, especially considering how much I adored the first one.
There is no question that in a first person book you have to love the narrator. There are certain chick lit books that I can’t read simply because the narrator drives me mad. A perfect example of this is Blair in TDF. I could not stand her. Her voice was like nails scratching across the chalkboard for me.