Keepers of Light

Daughter of Storms #3

by Louise Cooper

With her unique powers, Shar is driven to unlock the secrets of The Maze - a magical gateway through time. The Maze gives Shar the power to right and old wrong, but also to change the course of history. But as she faces it many terrifying dimensions - will The Maze lead Shar into deadly temptation?

Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Louise Cooper was born in Hertfordshire in 1952. She began writing stories when she was at school to entertain her friends. She hated school so much, in fact—spending most lessons clandestinely writing stories—that she persuaded her parents to let her abandon her education at the age of fifteen and has never regretted it.

She continued to write and her first full-length novel was published when she was only twenty years old. She moved to London in 1975 and worked in publishing before becoming a full-time writer in 1977. Since then she has become a prolific writer of fantasy, renowned for her bestselling Time Master trilogy. She has published more than eighty fantasy and supernatural novels, both for adults and children. She also wrote occasional short stories for anthologies, and has co-written a comedy play that was produced for her local school.

Louise Cooper lived in Cornwall with her husband, Cas Sandall, and their black cat, Simba. She gained a great deal of writing inspiration from the coast and scenery, and her other interests included music, folklore, cooking, gardening and "messing about on the beach." Just to make sure she keeps busy, she was also treasurer of her local Lifeboat station.

Louise passed away suddenly from a brain aneurysm on Tuesday, October 20, 2009. She was a wonderful and talented lady and will be greatly missed.

Reviews

[Pam Baddeley · Rating 1 out of 5]

This final volume in the Daughter of Storms trilogy differs from the other two in that the action is not triggered off by Shar's enemies, as they are now all dead or, in the case of the Sixth Plane, forced to retreat back to their place of origin. Instead, Shar becomes embroiled in a project at the wizards' castle to revive a disused method of instant travel involving a patch of grass outside the castle gate - the Maze - by means of an amulet.

As a junior initiate, Shar isn't officially involved but her sense of entitlement means that she soon starts secretly trying to master it herself, by getting the minor elementals she can control to "borrow" the amulet each night. Her powers mean that her experiments are far more successful than the official experiments, and she is able to teleport to distant places, but she soon realises that the amulet doesn't just take her through space, but also time. She then starts to try and control the times and places she can go back to, with the aim of killing her uncle before he can murder her parents. Unfortunately, this has repercussions with time being messed up and phantoms of the past being brought into the present, and ultimately her meddling might wreck all time and space.

As usual, Shar never thinks of others, not even her friends, but her self absorption and arrogance tip over into megalomania in this volume. When her experiment to travel without the amulet's aid fails, her reaction is telling: "It wasn't fair. She was a Daughter of Storms, she was a Dark Caller, she was special. The Maze should have worked for her, and the fact that it had not felt like a personal insult." She is an overgrown toddler - a spoilt brat as the musician Reyni called her in volume 2 - and it is baffling why her friends put up with her and like her. In this volume, she became so completely without redeeming features that, for me, she switched to being the villain that other people were trying to stop, and I was amazed by the ending when she is let off lightly and the High Initiate says she might in future be the best High Initiate ever. In my opinion, she didn't learn anything from her salutary lesson at the end, as she didn't show remorse for the destruction she was inflicting on everyone else; only when she herself was affected did she suddenly become sorry. So for that reason, I have to rate this at 1-star as I found her character so unlikeable.

[Kushnuma · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally finished this book!

It was a little difficult to get through but in the end, it wasn't too bad...