There are two reasons why I actually managed to get through this book. First of all, I was extremely sick with nothing else nearby that I could read, so it was something to do. The second reason is that I had this sense that there could have been more to it... there just wasn't. I also needed something to review on here...
Brief:
World-Building Rating: Shoddy
Characterization Rating: Shoddy
The Dawn Star is a romance story about random royal people in warring kingdoms. Two of the characters just happen to be able to preform "spells" which basically means they have the power to do whatever happens to be convenient at the time. I'm still not sure why stories like this keep ending up in the Fantasy/Sci-Fi section. There should have at least been a sticker on the book to warn me that it was a romance story pretending to have magic in it.
Overall, the magic failed to impress me, the characters did not seem to fit somehow, as if they were all teenagers dropped from our time into this random medieval world, and the "intrigue" and any semblance of plot failed to elicit any type of emotion because it was obvious that it was going to end happily with everyone pairing off and so on and so forth.
Skip it.
Seriously. But before you go read the rest of my review in which I reflect on why this book didn't work and what a good fantasy story needs that this one didn't have.
Details (SPOILERS ABOUND):
There's a kind of description that can make you feel like you've been transported to the world and you can see in your mind's eye everything the author is describing and much more that is merely implied. Examples of this include the description in Guy Gavriel Kay's works and, of course, Dickens, who also manages to inject humor into his tales. And then there's the kind of description where every time a character is introduced or every time they appear in a new scene the author feels compelled to tell you what color each item of clothing is and how expensive it must be and so on. The latter is the kind of description Asaro uses in this novel. Unfortunately, even with the minute details I was given about people's appearance, their clothes, the landscape, their clothes, the furniture in the rooms they are in and, of course, their clothes, I found it difficult to imagine any of these things. So the huge amounts of description were completely pointless. Without these pointless descriptions of clothing the novel would have been about 1/5 its current length.
Dialogue was another very irritating factor. It was inappropriate for the setting. Most of the time people sounded like they had just come out of some high school or Hollywood romance or something and when they tried to sound more formal or *gasp* teasing they ended up sounding laughable.
Also, the characters didn't sound or feel significantly different from each other. I got to know what everyone's hair color was and what they were wearing all the time, but by the end of the story the remaining characters all sounded like the same person.Let me phrase it differently: the characterizations were horrible. Especially at the end when people suddenly "didn't care if it was unseemly" for their station and went around randomly hugging each other. When the queen Jade started hugging all her war generals I was laughing my head off.
I won't even touch the names. When a character thinks their own name is too difficult to pronounce there's something wrong with the picture.
Which brings me to the whole thing with the different cultures in the story. With the failed characterizations this is only to be expected, but the different cultures in the story weren't all that different. The people from all these different cultures had all the same views (which are clearly the author's views), except for Ozar, the "bad guy" that had zero motivation for the stupid - and obviously un-strategic - things he was doing. The only real distinctions between the cultures were whether people had "yellow" hair or black hair, whether they lived in the desert or not, and, surprise, surprise, their positions on women's right to rule and not wear veils. There was a whole two page passage in which I was forced to wade through the author's boring and completely unintelligent essay on veils.
When it comes to the magic system and the battles and the suspense that one would hope for Asaro's descriptive powers suddenly fail. The descriptions of the spells are so "by the way" and it seems as if she didn't really know where she was going with it most of the time. It was just a way for her to get out of having real harm come to characters that she was in love with. I mean, a supposedly beautiful queen gets kidnapped, drugged, hung up in a dungeon from the shackles on her hands, stripped naked, and whipped without any actual harm coming to her or her unborn baby. And then her amazing magical powers bring down the entire tower that she's in without any harm coming to her or baby. She is later seen thinking, passingly, that she didn't know how she had survived. It reaches a point where it just gets silly. The other magical character is said to be found at the bottom of a cliff and then suddenly he's walking around talking about how agile performers like him never get hurt or something. I'm sorry, but no.
And did I mention all the hugging and raising of "curmudgeonly eyebrows". What kind of word is curmudgeonly anyway and why do I see it more than once in the same novel? Words like that shouldn't be repeated more than once within the same dimension.
Overall, and moving past the annoyances and jokes, I think the fantasy genre could do with less romance writers mucking about in it. Seriously, if you want to write a medieval romance novel it is marketable, just stop inserting random thoughtless magic and trying to sell it off as speculative fiction. There's nothing speculative or boundary-pushing about these kinds of stories.
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