The Price of Spring [Hardcover]

I just finished the last of the books in Daniel Abraham's "Long Price Quartet" series, and I'm so sincerely impressed and excited about the series, I just wanted to give it a shout out here. The first book started a little slow but gradually pulled me in, and it just kept getting better until this last one; which is absolutely outstanding.

The last reviewer covered some of the plot details; and I don't want to inadvertantly slip in any spoilers, so let me just say this: I love it when sci-fi and fantasy writers go the extra mile with the depth and believability of their characters (sometimes the world-building or the magic system or the spaceship engines are meticulously detailed, and the actual people are cardboard cut-outs, you know what I mean?) and this guy went absolute extra light years! His people are such thoroughly real and unique individuals you feel like you've known them for years, and everything they think and feel and do is exactly what you would think and feel and do in their place.
I didn't realize how much that aspect of good story-telling was missing from some of the things I've read lately until I saw it done so well again here. All those tell-tale little details of characterization and world-building are present here in spades - too many to go into, but you get the idea.

And the guy has such a lyrical writing style! You know that first page of Patrick Rothfuss's book "The Name of the Wind", where all the author is doing is describing for paragraphs the exact nature of the silence around the inn that night, and you could just weep for the beauty of the language? Well, in Abraham's "The Price of Spring", practically the whole BOOK is written that gorgeously, and still the action never lets up.

OK. Enough fan-girl gushing! Thanks for listening; I think I'm done raving now! Just buy this series if you love a really good, really absorbing novel, fantasy genre or not. If I was as good a writer as Abraham, I could explain better why you'll thank me later - but just trust me, you will.

This review covers all four books. The first thing I noticed was the stakes increased from each book to the next. Book one essentially evolved around a plot to remove a single poet from a single city. Book two focuses on a central characters rise to ruling a city. Book 3 involves a fight to save an entire country or collection of cities. Book 4 involves a plot to save 2 nations from complete anihilation. The books are character driven but increase in plot intensity from one book to the next. The plot holes in book one seem to not appear in books 2-4 as the writer's skill increases.

The series is aplty named: The Long Price. The focus is on the price poets pay to control andants (essentially the only magic or fantasy element in these stories). There is a price of power and it is always related to the poet themselves. Essentially they cannot create this power with also creating their own price they must pay. But the price of decisions is carried on as a theme for all characters and all decisions. The decision to love someone and betray a friend has a price carried through all the novels. The decision to love someone and not take other wives has a price. The deicision to abandon being a husband and father has a price. The decision to strive for peace has a cost as does the decision to forgoe peace and seek unilateral victory. Over and over characters make decisions and the novels chronicle the cost of their decisions. In this, the novel is deep, character driven, and realistic.

The other thing I noted is that this is minimally fantasy. In other words, there is very little magic (limited to the andants), no non-human characters, no strange worlds. I dont say this as a critique. The author focus on a real world of politics, intrigue, and mercantilism. Armies cant feed themselves without farmers. Rulers cant have wealth without merchants being successful. The books recognize this and are very realistic in their writing.

The author also avoids fantasy tropes of good and evil characters. In the veins of GRR Martin, Glen Cook, Joe Ambercrombie, ect, ect... the characters here are not good and not bad. They are human and as such motivated to protect and advance themselves. The difference here is that most of these characters fall closer on the scale to good. If Martins characters are grey to black, Abrahams are grey to white. I actually found this refreshing, to see characters closer to the world I live in.

The last point, for a man, Mr Abraham writes women well. They are intuitive, strong, vulnerable, loving, intelligent, beautiful. So many fantasy writers seem to write women into boxes. The women who exist only for sex. The women who are so bitter and trying to fight males, they become strong but hard and callous. Mr Abraham wrote the women as well as the men in my opinion and a huge downside for me was the absence of the two main female characters in book 4.

In all, book 1 was 3.5 stars, books 2 and 3 are 4.0 stars, and book 4 is 4.5 stars for me. The nice thing about buying this series is you know it is done and complete. No waiting for 5 years for the next novel. That alone is worth something.

Volume 4 of the Long Price Quartet effectively brings the series to a conclusion, weaving characters and conflicts that began in earlier books into the climax. Fifteen years after the war described in the third volume, Otho Machi, now emperor, negotiates with the former enemy Galts to rebuild and strengthen both kingdoms through intermarriage and military alliance. Furious that his attempts to move into the future seem to ignore the suffering of the present generation, Machi's daughter Eiah joins with the poet Maati to bind new andat and return to the ways of the past. Maati creates a new poet, this time a young woman, but his disastrous choice once more demonstrates the dangers of the andat and the fatal combination of flawed character and great power.

Like the other volumes, this fourth one has a suspenseful, smoothly moving plot, although most the the twists are more predictable than in the earlier books. The characters continue to be complicated and full of human failings, and there are moving explorations of grief, loss, and aging, as well as writing rich in imagery. I had a few complaints: the afterward is long and anti-climactic, and Maati's failure to see the mistake he is making by giving a disturbed young woman control of an andat seems not just flawed, but stupid. These problems fade into the fascination of the story, however. The Long Price Quartet is an excellent, highly original work of fantasy which I enjoyed and recommend.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 28 reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars