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Title:
Lord of the Isles
Series: Lord of the Isles
#1
Author: David Drake
Rating: 4 of 5
Stars
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Pages:
681
Words: 199K
Publish: 1997
Ahhh,
the 90’s. A mythic time when everybody and their brother was
writing an Epic Fantasy series so big, so fantastic that it was sure
to top the book charts and become immortalized forever. Jordan,
Martin, Goodkind, Erikson, Weiss & Hickman, Cook and Williams,
just to name the authors that spring to my mind. Us fantasy fans ate
it up with a spoon and asked for more! Authors like David Drake took
up the challenge and churned out their own epics, which nobody would
remember, nor, in all honesty, should they.
The strength of the Lord of the Isles series was that Drake turned them out every 12-18 months. He wrote a total of nine books from 1997 to 2008 and he finished up the story. He gave us what we wanted and we got our fix almost every year, like the junkies we were. Bloody magical mayhem with main characters punching their way through a maelstrom of demons and otherworldly monsters. It was fantastic.
The weakness of the Lord of the Isles series was that Drake turned them out every 12-18 months. The action was fast and furious, but the characters were about as deep as cardboard. Stock, cliched phrases defined who the characters were. They weren’t people, they were tropes.
When I first read Lord of the Isles (the book, not the entire series) in ‘97, I loved it so much that my brother gave me his hardcover copy for my birthday. I was happy as a clam. As each book came out I enjoyed them even while realizing how shallow they were. I got my magical mayhem fix and that was all I was looking for. Once Drake had finished the Lord of the Isles series, he began another unrelated series and I realized he was writing almost the same story with pieces just moved around and I gave up on him. I had not recorded or reviewed that I had read the first three books in the Lord of the Isles series so in 2012-2013 I remedied that but stopped after book three as I then had all nine books in the series recorded.
Which brings us to 2025. I am always looking for books and series to re-read (you can see some of my reasoning in my old post “Why I re-read” from 2018) and I remembered how much I had enjoyed Lord of the Isles and so the whole series went into the tbr rotation. I also remember how wooden Drake made his characters though, so I decided to break the series up by interspersing it with the Dracule Files. I’d read three of the Dracula books, then three of the Lord of the Isles books, then Dracula, rinse and repeat. That gave me a break and I vaguely remembered the nine books being broken up, story wise, into three trilogies, so that would work out well too. Which FINALLY brings us to the actual review of this specific book.
I usually compare books to food. I haven’t done that in a while and I’m not going to do it here either. But I have found that I like to compare the books I read to other things that I have an emotional resonance with or against, depending on the book in question. This time I’m going to compare it to a music album I came across years ago. Gregorian: The Dark Side of the Chant. I’d say the album cover describes it well enough. It also describes this book.
There are six main characters who all meet in a small village, go their separate ways, have an unending stream of world shaking adventures and then come back together to have the biggest adventure of all. Then it is revealed that that was just the tip of the iceberg, so stay turned for the next book!
We get everything from cannibal eskimos to humanoid insectivores to slime liches to parasitic demon trees to literal demons and boy howdy, do our characters mow through them like they are on a rocket powered lawn mower.
The weakness I talked about before are all here, in smaller doses so for this book it isn’t intolerable. But it is why this will never get more than 4stars from me and I suspect that after this series re-read that I will not consider re-reading it again. I did debate about even re-reading the entire series after finishing this one book, but that streak of masochism I have buried deep inside of me decided to show up and so I’ll be reading the whole series, no matter how much I suffer. Much like the read of Neuromancer, this will be A Project and not just a read. But it shouldn’t be a hate read as I plan on ringing every drop of enjoyment out of the series that I can :-D Magical mayhem and demon guts all over the place has a special spot in my hard little grinchy heart, hahahahaa.
★★★★☆
From the Publisher
Into this world, as the wellsprings of magical power rise to a millennial height, a sorceress from a thousand years past is cast upon the shore of a small island. She has survived the cataclysm that destroyed the powerful empire of the Isles in her time. She finds herself in a small town far from the new centers of power, but among a small group who, all unknowing, will become the focus of a new struggle for dominance and magical power that will shake this world, and others.
For The Hooded One, the most powerful sorcerer of all time, has also survived the ancient catastrophe he created. The peace of the small village is destroyed in an instant, and the young principles must set out on a quest to meet their destiny.
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