The Assassin King – Elizabeth Haydon

Tor, Copyright 2006, 415 pages

ISBN: 978-0-7653-4474-8

Read: July 2012 (at age 35)

First time read

What to Expect:

This is book #6 of the Symphony of Ages.  I got fooled by the cover blurb into thinking it was #4.  It is definitely the initial part of a story.

From the back cover:

Two gatherings of great import are taking place:  The first is a convocation of dragons, who gather in a primeval forest glade – the site of the horrific ending of Llauron, one of the last of their kind.  They mourn not only his irrevocable death, but also the loss of the lore and control over the earth that it represents.

The second gathering is a council of war:  Ashe and Rhapsody, rulers of the alliance that protects the Middle Continent; Gwydion, the new Duke of Navarne; Anborn, the Lord Marshal; Achmed, the King of Ylorc, and Grunthor, his Seargeant-Major.  Each brings news that forms the pieces of a great puzzle.

As each piece is added, it becomes quite clear: War is coming, the likes of which the world has never known.

My comments:  (spoilers ahoy!)

Overall: 

This isn’t really a fair review. I read the book out of order, and that really, really should not be done in a series like this.

Now that that’s out of the way, here are my reactions. 

I really didn’t like this book much at all.  I was looking forward to reading it, as I quite enjoyed the original trilogy, other than the sappy unnecessary wedding at the end.  This one – I didn’t actually feel like I’d missed much despite having skipped two books.  That’s a bad sign to start with.  The only thing was that I wasn’t invested in the characters, and it took most of the book to even figure out where the story was, and what was just background.

There was a LOT of exposition.  In the first half of the book, it varied between direct narration infodumps, “as you know, Bob”-styled unrealistic conversations, and conferences where everyone infodumps, in character.  The second half-or-so of the book at least added a few action scenes between the infodumps.

So that’s the plot.  The characters were all right, I guess, but the randomly occurring occasional dropping into pseudo-medieval language by some of the characters bothered me.  It just didn’t help.  It wasn’t even like specific characters had that as a speech characteristic, it was just random.  By this time in the series, we have some serious power creep going on – the magic gear was too powerful, and the characters were godlike, and it got in the way.  The exposition kept saying that the enemy was terribly powerful and evil and all that, but we didn’t really ever get shown it.  All we saw were Kill Bill-esque 1 vs. 50 swordfights, in which the 50 were terribly, terribly outnumbered.

Anyway. That’s probably enough ranting.  I nearly didn’t finish the book.  I probably shouldn’t have.  At the end of it, I have no desire to read books 4 and 5, and also no desire to pick up whatever books are left in the series. 

Rating: 2

Other opinions:

Writerly Ramblings

Didn't like it much, despite liking the rest of the series.

Three Descriptors

Loved it.