Owlsight (Hardcover)

If we look past the lousy writing, what do we find? Not much. I complained that the plot of "Owlflight" was slow. In this book, it's almost nonexistent. The first three-hundred pages are spent entirely on introducing the two main characters and showing us many, many, many scenes of them chatting with friends, eating, and otherwise going through the motions of an ordinary day. We have Darian, who's still hanging out with the Hawkbrothers and endlessly ruminating about unworthy and inferior he is. And then we have the healer Keisha, who is hanging out in Errold's Grove and endlessly ruminating about how unworthy and inferior she is. The new army of barbarians doesn't show up until almost the end of the book, and the authors' method for dealing with them sounds forced and unrealistic. After four-hundred-and-fifty pages, "Owlsight" limps to a close without giving us a proper climactic showdown, or even a single action scene. At no point do we ever get a decent portrait of any character. You would think that right before a showdown with a large and possibly dangerous army, these teenagers would be at least a little bit nervous, right. But in "Owlsight", they act like it's a walk in the park.

I don't think that I'll even bother reading the final volume of this syrupy series. After all, don't we all know how it's going to end? Darian and Keisha will fall madly in love, but it will somehow take them several hundred pages to express their feeling for each other. Meanwhile, a new bunch of bad guys will show up from somewhere, but our heroes will once again find a clever way to deal with them, and all will be right with the world. Yawn. I have better things to do with my time than sitting around reading predictable claptrap like this.

Darian, who has been in training with the Tayledras for over four years has mastered his gift and is now ready to return to Errold's grove as the town wizard. Together with his companions, the Hawkbrothers, and his newfound friend, Keisha, he establishes a settlement for his new community right outside the village. Together, with the villagers, and the Heralds of Valdemar, they prepare to fight their greatest challenge - an invading force of barbarians.

While I liked Owl Sight, I found the plot a bit rambling. I did not like the 'switching perspectives' between Darian and Keisha, and there wasn't a lot of action. Also, I felt both Keisha and Darian suffered from 'super hero' syndrome. Both characters are way to mature and perfect to be human, and thus were almost boring.. Darian was at times almost insufferably wise and brilliant, doing everything from lecturing elders, to designing his own settlement, all at the ripe age of 18! (I winced when Darian was giving his teachers relationship and teaching advice <groan>).

I was also disappointed to see very little of Snowfire, Darian's mentor. He faded into the background to become just another of Darian's spear-carrier in this books, with no voice of his own. >Sigh<. Overall, a good, but somewhat predictable read.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who noticed the xenophobia of the Hawkbrothers. For people who complained about what goody goodies the characters were, I can't subscribe to that view myself--maybe it just seems that way because the only viewpoints we really get are theirs and they never ask themselves whether their views might be wrong. "Owlsight" is the most ethnocentric of the Velgarth books to date: this in spite of the fact that the characters displaying the xenophobia comprise a host of different humans and non-humans (Taleydras, Valdemarans, Heralds, Companions, gryphons, dyheli, kyree, tervardi, etc.) all of whom appear incapable of conceiving that the "barbarian" horde approaching might be no more barbaric than they themselves. Perhaps Lackey thought without this blindsidedness there wouldn't be much of a story, but she handled it somewhat unbelievably. For example, Darian is shocked at the notion that Northern tribes might be as different from one another as Taleydras and Valdemarans, as if he had truly never thought of it before. For all the passages Lackey expends on their endless, "indepth" discussions, this implies that Darian's thinktank of friends and colleagues is doing a childishly pathetic job.

A pathetic job indeed. There is a great deal in this book that goes flagrantly against the message of previous novels in this series. The Heralds, who should be acting as third parties, make things worse. One might expect them to at least remark on the usage of the term "barbarian" but they adopt it themselves without question. Nor do Kerowyn and Eldan make an effort to uphold the Valdemaran motto "There is no one true way." Regardless of the fact that the Ghost Cat tribe has not done anything wrong, there is no attempt to contact them on decent terms. Instead the big plan is to "pull a Cortez" and pretend to be spirit people so as to overawe them.

Even then, when the tribe does nothing wrong and, according to Valdemaran law as depicted in previous books, they have done nothing undeserving of the free sanction of their people, the Valdemaran/Taleydras alliance does not appear to make any follow-up on communications with them. Instead, there is discussion of burning the entire tribe to death to avoid the sickness they carry. It would be one thing if this option were coached as a last-ditch course of action: however, Kerowyn discusses it casually and seems to consider it their first. Kerowyn is portrayed in pretty poor terms all around: when the Healers under her command discuss possible steps they might take for healing the "barbarians," she bursts in on them in an immature fashion, yelling that they are stupid for even thinking of such a thing, apparently unable to tell apart discussion from action and forgetting that it is in fact her Healers' *jobs* to think about this stuff. However, the Healers are also not without flaw when one makes a distasteful remark about being reluctant to heal people who eat their food raw--something that a Healer simply would not be capable of saying in Lackey's world as it has been portrayed till now.

Not only is there a breakdown in communication with the tribe but within the Valdemaran-Taleydras ranks as well...for no good reason. Leaving aside the ethical questions of kidnapping a "barbarian" for medical experiments without even asking if anyone with the disease would like to volunteer, what is it that prevents Keisha and Darien from mentioning it to their friends? They could easily get their little scheme okayed, considering all the callousness that these people have demonstrated towards the "barbarians." The kidnapping is then followed by a forcible mental "language transaction" that basically amounts to what Lackey has in the past referred to as "mindrape." Keisha and Darian, however, do not give it a moment's thought.

All this is not to say that this xenophobia might not have been a valuable element of the book. It was certainly the most interesting. The problem is that it wasn't handled well at all: it was overwritten to the point of unbelievability, and it wasn't explored as it could have been. Characters hold their xenophobic views without change. No one plays Devil's Advocate (beyond Darian's superficial speech about wanting to drop women and children off of cliffs but knowing that he has to wait and see the tribe before he does) and so, until the kidnapping of Hywel, there is no real sense of another side, and then it is too late to provide anything interesting. All is apparently justified by the ease with which parties interact in the next book, "Owlknight," when "barbarian" appears to be a word of the past and Ghost Cat lives in peaceable coexistence with the Taleydras-Valdemarans. There is no reference to the process which has made this possible and which could have provided some real meat for the book. Instead it becomes merely glossed over and pointless: an exercise in prejudice and xenophobia without rhyme, reason or reward.