Okay, I'll be honest. These books drove me CRAZY. I mean, it was a nice epic story about a girl who is the "one who will save us all", as she discovers her powers as a Bard in a mythical land. Sound familiar?
Ya I thought so too.
Let me put it this way. It was basically "The Lord of the Rings" only with a 15-16 year old girl instead of a hobbit. Now I like "Lord of the Rings" knock offs, most modern fantasy is in some way is copied from Tolkien's work. But this one was a little TOO obvious. This girl has a tragic history as a slave in a cruel mountain fortress of sorts. She is helped to escape by a Bard, and suddenly he decides that she is the daughter of the Head Bard of a lost city. And she has immense power that scares everybody, good and bad.
Croggan is creative with the culture she creates with all the signs of being a true Tolkien knock off including random apostrophes in the middle of the names of villages like Cai'paval or something similar. But she follows the genre and outline too closely. Nothing is a surprise, you kind of can predict what will happen before it happens. From the beginning of the first book "The Naming" to the last book "The Singing" you know that she is going to save the day. Usually in books like that there is always a point where you aren't sure. Even when the girl spends most of the second book as a hormonal witch, you still know that in the end she is going to defeat the big, bad guy at the end of the fourth book. It was too predictable.
Even in Harry Potter, you don't know if Harry dies or not. There is still that level of unpredictability, even though the reader knows that Harry will save the day. You still don't know if he will survive it. In the Chronicles of Pellinor the author goes on and on about how the main character had no real childhood and that she was deprived of all that was truly hers, so OF COURSE she is going to live. The author couldn't bear to kill her off after all that!!
In "Lord of the Rings", in spite of what everyone says about it being a happy ending: FRODO DIES. Not only does Frodo fail in his mission (he did too, Gollum did it for him), it eventually kills him, thats what going across the sea means...he did what he did to save the Shire, to stay and live peacefully in the Shire, but HE DOESN'T!! Most fantasy's don't have happy endings for the main characters. The Chronicles of Pellinor's ending is WAY too happy. None of the main charaters die and they all live happily ever after with no real lasting effects of their adventures...BLAGH..
So over all it is worth a read, but I won't buy these books. Too predictable. Like I knew that girl was going to get together with her mentor at the end of the books from the very first book. DUH!
Creative, but predictable. And believe me. High fantasy is rather predictable, but this was overly so.
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