You have to keep an eye on Janny Wurts. Just when you think you can’t take one more page of her tedious, overblown dialogue, she hits you with twenty pages worth of action crammed into a few paragraphs.
For the most part, reading this book was a chore. It was something I felt I had to do, rather than something I really wanted to do. After fifty pages worth of Janny’s purplest prose, I wanted to do something –anything- else. Even housework. But I swallowed the bile and continued on.
A dragon destroys a city. There. Blink and you’ll miss it though, coming as it does after several hundred pages of the principal character Arithon saying that he’s not going anywhere near the siege, no he’s not, he won’t be drawn into it. Then he travels within sight of said siege, still denying he wants any part of it. Next he’s inside the walls, still saying the same thing. I was quite bored by this time. So very, very bored. Even envisioning the two armies of the siege yelling “get on with it!” at the author, in the style of Monty Python, was not enough to keep me interested.
Then the dragon destroys the city. Oh, and did you know it was the dragons that brought the Fellowship sorcerers to the planet in the first place? That’s quite the revelation, and in fact it’s one of the more interesting parts of the book. All two pages of it.
I had entertained hopes that Stormed Fortress would be the last of this series. Eight books in and frankly not a lot has happened. Arithon runs away. Lysaer chases him. There’s a fight, and lots of Lysaer’s soldiers die. Lysaer vows revenge. Arithon runs away. Lysaer chases him. And so on.
At the end of this book a child is born, whose job it will be to watch over Arithon in the next generation. She can do it without me.
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