The Lioness: The Age of Mortals [Mass Market Paperback]

 

 

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I just finished reading The Lioness by Nancy Varian Berberick and while I enjoyed reading it to a point there were some down right flooring disparities between the existing history of the characters and what Nancy Varian Berberick wrote, I can't believe this got past an editor at wizards of the coast. The issues are in relations to Douglas Niles "The Puppet King" which takes place before The Lioness and deals with some of the same characters. Before I go into specifics here is a *spoiler warning* if you have not read the Puppet King or don't want to know the details of the Lioness, stop here.

First of all, in NVB's (Nancy Varian Berberick) version Kerianseray is a kagonesti slave who has forgotten her Kagonesti roots. For the first quarter of the book she stumbles around the woods, clumsier than a dwarf and spends a good portion of the book relearning her woodsman skills. In the Puppet King, Kerianseray is not just a slave but a kagonesti spy who stays in the city of her own accord to warn her people of potential slavers coming their way and to keep an eye on the Qualinesti. Here's a line from the Puppet King regarding Kerianseray's woodsman skills, "My daughter has been trained to know the stealth of a deer and the speed of a rabbit." (pg. 231) Perhaps, Kerianseray stopped spying and relaying messages to the Kagonesti following the chaos wars leading to her skills deteriorating but NVB never mentions this as a possiblity.

The second issue, the reason for Kerianseray's departure from Qualinesti she sees her cousin's decapitated head piked on a bridge and fears for her brother's life. This assumes that she has had no contact with her family since being captured. That quote in the previous paragraph, that was Dallatar, Kerianseray's father, whom she relayed messages for in the Puppet King. It stands to reason that if Kerianseray is in contact with her family she could meet her father to voice her concerns about her brother without leaving Qualinesti for good. Again, NVB could've addressed the possibility that after saving Porthios's life, Dallatar and his wife dissapeared into the woods and never told Kerianseray, but that's a stretch.

The third glaring mistake is that, Senator Rashas is alive. Rashas, was the senator responsible for ensnaring Gilthas and kidnapped Alhana in order to force Porthios to give up his position as speaker of the sun. In the Puppet King Rashas dies at the end (on page 307) a fiery chaos dragon crushes him. In The Lioness, he is not only alive but is the senator who owns Kerianseray. now he does not play a large part in The Lioness but he's a major character in The Puppet King. Just having him pop up alive is a big oversight.

That's alot of errors to overlook and if you have read Puppet King first you'll likely spend the first third of the book gnashing your teeth and muttering about the oversights. However, the main character, Kerianseray (the lioness) is a great character. I wish there would have been more of her in War of the Souls trilogy and I look forward to reading about her more in the elven exiles trilogy. Her change from a common slave girl secretly in love with the king to the leader of a group of outlaws fighting the knights of Neraka is a a joy to read I just wish it could of been in line with the previous history of the characters.

This is a taut, thrilling story, full of action and adventure. It propels the reader along at an ever-intensifying pace to an all-out, satisfying resolution. Well plotted and keenly envisioned. I heartily recommend it for all fans of Dragonlance.

I did really try to like this one, after all it has a really cool cover right? Those that know my DL reviews are aware that I don't think much of Nancy Varian Beberick's work in the shared fantasy world. But this time I thought I would let all the past over-descriptive romance-fantasies slide and begin anew. Like I said, really cool cover and all.

Well the Lioness was a better outing but sadly still was not a good novel. The writing as a whole has gotten a ton better, no two paragraphs spent on describing how an elf wears their hair in this one. But the plot and structure are still horrid in many regards. Speaking of the structure itself first, I must say it was badly designed. The beginning half is fine, but as the second half moves on it gets more and more rushed, and more and more unreadable. Characters are forgotten and then pop up only to die, plot points are rushed, the last fifty pages ends up being nothing more than a massacre and then no resolutions are made on some of the main character deaths during that massacre.

Next point, the villain. One Skull Knight named Eamutt Thagol. He's a wimp. Oh he's tough on the powerscale, he's got some freaky mentalist powers, but on the villain-o-meter he falls short. That's because he's really only got one thing going for him, wanton brutality. He's not really all that clever, and he just kind of popped up in the overall story line of dragonlance. Other than killing a ton of elves he didn't do a thing and because of that the only fear he gave to the protagonist was death. More so my personal dislike for the character comes from the fact that he was an easy out from having to deal with writing Marshall Medan.

Last, the editing in this novel was horrible. Grammatical errors all over the place, strange wording in parts, and almost no knowledge whatsoever of the overall plotline in dragonlance. The worst such discrepancy was that Senator Rashas, plainly dying in the Puppet King by Douglas Niles set thirty years before the Lioness and even thought of as dead in the War of Souls novels, is alive in this novel. It amazes me how the author, and all the editors could miss such a rather large inconsistency. Also Tanis Half-Elven is thought of as alive as far as ten years after the Chaos War and the Elven Prince Porthius is thought of as dying before his time as well.

FINAL THOUGHT: Some elves die, then some knights die, rinse and repeat for a lackluster novel.

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