The Briar King Comments
A Kingdom of Thorn and Bone (Greg Keyes)
Keyes stunned the fantasy community with his phenomenal new high fantasy novel, The Briar King, a few years ago. This guy
is a master of the English language. His writing is both witty and beautiful; sort of an Oscar Wild meets J.R.R. Tolkien synergy.
His plot is thick, rich with interesting characters (and the dialogue is top notch and at times, hilarious), and the world fairly
gritty, though less so than George R. Martin's. Keyes takes old fantasy cliches and creates something new. I can't recommend this
fantasy series enough. Keyes continues his excellent standard throughout the series.
Feel free to rate The Briar King on the Community Book Review section of the site.
I read the first of the series years ago before the second was released. I was blown away with it. This year in between series, I sat down and reread the first novel as well as the rest of the series. By the last book I was left with a very disappointed feeling in my gut and a slightly felt huh? in my mind. The plot just seems to fall apart later in the series, like the author was tired of writing it and just picked up a bunch of loose threads and tied them to each other to get it over with. I agree with most of what is on this site, but this series was not so great to me.
I was excited about reading this book after seeing the recommendation on this site. While I did like some parts of the story, I found it very irritating that the main characters were so flat and un-dynamic. The world is their, they know the rules for magic and history and what not. Yet, there is a refusal to believe what is obvious to the reader. If a paragraph can convince me of a reality in the story, the characters shouldn't leave the event doubting that it happened. I found this story very difficult to get into to, simply because the characters themselves didn't seams to want to be in the story. Nothing worse than a main character going chapter after chapter saying "why me" and "I don't understand."