Rielle’s and Tyen’s brief acquaintanceship blossoms into something more, but both have secrets and responsibilities that keep them apart. Rielle has to protect and teach Qall, the young boy that the Raen tried to sacrifice. Tyen us still trying to save Valla and restore her to human form. Rielle and Tyen respect each other's obligations, but their decisions keep them apart.
Rielle takes Qall to far away, traveling through many worlds to try and avoid the notice of the Raen’s allies, but Qall is not the easiest student. The two butt heads and disagree more often than not. Tyen is drawn into a plot to resurrect the Raen. He needs more knowledge to resurrect Valla, but can he bring himself to bring back the Raen, to betray his friends, and to kill?
My Take:
I wanted to like this. The world is amazing, the writing is excellent, but I never got into it. I found it a bit of a slog to get through.
The main characters hook up too quickly. They met briefly at the end of the second book. Five cycles have passed between the books, and they have not met again. They talk twice in Successor’s Promise, and that’s all it takes. It felt forced to me. I’ve never found political negotiations overly romantic, but I guess it really got to these two.
Talk to each other! So much misunderstanding could be avoided if people just talked to people they should talk to. Yeah, sharing secrets is a risk, but this is a world where people can read minds. Not sharing secrets is dangerous too. This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Books need conflict, but a conflict that generates out of a lack of communication is overused.
I’m waiting for something to happen. 300 pages in, I was still waiting for something to happen. There’s a lot of running from world to world, some studying, some tinkering with machines, a lot of plotting, and not much is actually happening. Nothing happens until the very end, and that was anticlimactic.
We’re fighting a severed hand? Okay, I know the fight isn’t against the hand, but what the hand could become. It’s a notional threat, and one that many characters can’t decide how big a threat it is. Things are bad either way, so many aren’t sure if the Rein returning would be so bad. It’s an odd thing to hang the whole story on.
Tyen, get it together! Pick a side and stick with it. Way to wishy-washy for one of the most powerful sorcerers in the universe.
Qall needs more personality. He is pivotal to the book, but there isn’t a lot of character development with him. Canavan is good at character development, so I’m assuming this was on purpose. He is only five cycles old, so maybe he's supposed to appear as a blank slate of sorts? It didn’t work for me. Qall is a B-level character filling the role of an A-level character.
Memories equal a person? One of the fun things in fantasy is the way it can explore philosophical ideas. What is a person? Are we just a collection of memories? If I transfer my memories to a robot, is that robot now me? This is an important question in the book. (I think the answer is obvious. Hunger makes me crabby; stomachaches make me depressed. It’s part of who I am and has nothing to do with memories.) They do explore this question but briefly. The villain's goal is predicated on the idea that memories equal person, and he doesn’t ever question it. I’d have liked to see him face this question, even if it were only to rationalize it away.
I didn’t post reviews for the first two books in this series. I’d give them three stars each. I liked them but didn’t love them. I was disappointed with Successor’s Promise. I was expecting more, and I’m not sure if I’ll read the next book. I don’t hate this book, not by any stretch. It is okay and has some good characters and an imaginative world. On the whole, I found it boring, but if you loved the first two books, then you may like this one more than I did.