Paladin of Souls

(book completed March 6)
I have to force myself to read fiction. Otherwise I'll read non-fiction book after non-fiction book until my brain is bursting with so much interesting information that I either A.) Forget everything I learned; or B.) Become burnt out with reading. Now I'm working through the Hugo award-winners that are available through the Penn Hills Library. The Hugo Award goes to the best science fiction or fantasy book of the year. Typically it's Sci-Fi.

Unfortunately, very few high-quality science fiction and fantasy books have been written since the 1970s. I have found many of the winners to be poorly written or distractingly out of date. Really good science fiction should be relatively timeless, even if some things didn't quite work out the way they were written. (see HG Wells, Phillip K Dick, CS Lewis, Jules Verne). I have been growing tired of some of the weak Sci-Fi books on the list and was looking forward to this book, a rare Fantasy Hugo-winner.

For this selection, I read Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold. The story is actually a sequel, which I did not discover until after I finished it, but you don't really need to know the original story to know what's going on. You may need it to better connect with the characters, because I found them to be extremely flat and boring.

The story revolves around Ista, a queen trying to escape her homeland. She travels along with a small group of followers and helpers. Along the way they encounter demons that possess others, a rival tribe that captures them, mysterious half-brothers, and eventually encounter the force that is behind much of the evil in the book. It's farely fast-paced, but not as compelling as one might hope.

The fantasy element of this book is its mythology. The religious system of this book is based on a five-god system, where different rival tribes follow different gods. There are also "saints" and demons. Ista is a "saint" and can detect the presence of demons and can peer inside of others' souls. She spends parts of the book in dreams, which all play a part in the larger story. Demons are evil spirits that possess animals or humans. They can travel from one body to another, but only sometimes. Additionally, there are sorcerers, who harness the powers of demons (they are typically possessed themselves) and weild great power.

The book itself is decently written, particularly for modern fantasy/scifi. The problem is in the characters and the mythology. Perhaps I'm missing something from not having read the first book, but I just could not connect to the characters. They seemed flat and uninteresting. Character development is almost absent, and I found myself not really caring about their fates. The mythology was not well developed or explained, seeming very generic and extremely inauthentic. It's hard to see why the characters in the book would be so devoted to the gods they follow.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
In a sentence: You know what you like - if you like this kind of book, you'll like this one, but if you don't it would be best avoided.




so far...6 days, 1 book...at this rate I'll read 66/100 books (my pace will pick up in the summer)