Stronghold – Melanie Rawn

Daw Fantasy, Copyright 1990, 578 pages

ISBN: 0-88677-482-9

Read: March 2014 (at age 35)

First time read

What to Expect:

The start of a sequel trilogy –The Dragon Prince trilogy comes first.  I enjoyed The Dragon Prince, but about 10 years ago.

From the back cover:

[blah, blah, the first series was great, blah]

Now, in Stronghold, the first novel of Melanie’s new DRAGON STAR trilogy, there is a devastating new challenge to the power of both the High Prince Rohan and Andry, Lord of the Sunrunners at Goddess Keep, as a mysterious and seemingly unstoppable invasion force swarms across their lands.  For Andry, it signals the start of a nightmare made real, the horrifying fulfillment of his long ago visions of his homeland in flames, and he will draw upon even the forbidden sorcerer’s magic in an attempt to destroy this enemy which is bent on the extermination of all Sunrunners.

Rohan and his son Pol will also fight the enemy with every weapon at their command – from their valiant warriors, to conjurations with the sun, moons, and stars, to the terrifying presence of the dragons, to the unforgiving wrath of the Desert itself.  Yet soon they begin to fear that this invasion may prove not only the end of their dream of an unbreakable peace but the beginning of the end of their entire world…

My comments:  (spoilers ahoy!)

Overall: 

It may be that I was expected to have remembered more from the previous series, but I found the book confusing, and with cause and effect only loosely related to one another.  The new characters weren’t really memorable, and the story and action scenes were really bad.  I’m… I’m not sure I should have bothered to finish the book, and I don’t think I’ll read the rest of the series.  That’s unfortunate.  I still like the voice, but…  there it is.

Rating: 2

Characters:

There were a lot of characters that I remembered and liked from the previous series.  Unfortunately, they were mostly flattened into cardboard cutouts of themselves, and were somehow less appealing than before.  Then, there were all the children – named for the major characters of the previous story, which is a nice idea in principle, but in practice, I had no idea who they were.  There were also too many characters, so it would have been tough to keep everyone straight in any case, but seriously?  Sionell, Sionead, Siona, Sioneva. Chayla, Chayly, Chaynal, Chiana, etc. etc..  I just kept reading, hoping it would become clearer as we went along, but no such luck.  

Setting:

Nothing really new.  And since I didn’t remember much for details from the previous series, not enough details for me to really know what was where.

Plot:

A quick summary:  The story starts in utopia.  Which is then inexplicably invaded and our heroes randomly lose battles, until the main character (from the previous story) dies of a heart attack.  

As far as I can tell, the author needed her characters to look good and lose, so that’s what happened.  There was little relation that I could tell between what the characters did, and what resulted.  

The climactic battle was a pretty good summary of that – I didn’t really know what the plans were, but they were winning decisively, moving into the endgame and total defeat of the enemy host, and then they were completely defeated by… I’m not really sure, since we didn’t know the plans. 

I know some of the casters were defeated, but all of a sudden, from all the bad guys being trapped in a canyon and being obliterated by archers, we fell back to “overwhelming numbers – we’ve totally lost”.  That happened throughout the book.

Readability:

Readability was actually very good.  I like the author’s voice, and I even cared about a few of the characters.  The plotting killed any momentum, though, and I really struggled to get through it.

  

Rating: 2

Other opinions:

PFS The Book Club

Kinda what I saw, but a little bit more positive.

I read a few reviews ahead, and basically they all said that this series is terrible.  So.  I'm done. You've been warned.