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2.0étoiles sur 5
a noble but ultimately frustrating failure, Nov. 29 2000
I discovered Janny Wurts by reading "Keeper of the Keys," the middle volume of the Cycle of Fire, and have since read many of her books. I love her ability to create moving and absorbing characters, an interconnected plot, and wonderful descriptive passages (when she isn't tripping over her own wordiness, that is). So when I found "The Master of White Storm" in a library I thought, "Hey, it's Janny Wurts; even if it's an early work, it must be decent."Sadly, I was wrong. Korendir's friend is an instantly forgettable whiner; the only reason I remember his existence (though not his name) is that, unfortunately, much of the story is seen through his eyes. To be fair, he also has one brief, moving scene at the end of the book. Korendir could have been interesting, but is never seen clearly enough until the end. And after his motivations are finally somewhat clarified, I found some of his earlier actions even less explicable. Furthermore, the magic is not well thought-out; it is neither mystical enough to be left largely unexplained nor coherent enough to be believable. "The Master of White Storm" tells the story of Korendir, a man with a mysterious past, who escapes from slavers and becomes a hero-for-hire. He wants to build an impregnable fortress, called, unsuprisingly, White Storm. His badly connected adventures are uniformly depressing, though otherwise dissimilar, and the plot threads involving his heritage and his wife read like a late attempt to add meaning to an essentially lightweight story. The book struggles to meld episodic adventure with deep, philosophical questions about human nature and motivations; it is, perhaps, a noble attempt to humanize an adventurer, but in my opinion, it fails. It doesn't work well as an adventure (too moody and slow) or as a serious novel (too disjointed and vague). Reading "The Master of White Storm" is a reasonable way to fill an otherwise empty afternoon (unless you have other books available), but nothing more. And don't be surprised if you find yourself wondering just what exactly Janny Wurts was thinking when she wrote it.
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