I always find the question of where to start someone off with this series to be a difficult one. I began with The Broken Crown and I still think the writing is noticeably better than some of the other choices. OTOH, at least one person I tried to get to like the series was turned off by this book because (or so he told me) there were no sympathetic male characters. (Part of me thinks here, "Welcome to being a woman," but I can't say it's not a valid reason to dislike a book when I feel the same way about a lack of sympathetic female characters.) I happen to think that opinion is unfair to Kallandras and Valedan and, for all his flaws, I have a lot of sympathy for Sendari, but "sympathetic" is such a subjective thing that I can't say he's wrong.
However, the problem with Hunter's Oath as a starting point is that, in many ways, it seems to me that the entire book is merely a prologue to Hunter's Death. A necessary prologue, certainly, and I enjoy it a great deal, but it doesn't have a real ending of its own and much of it is background on Breodanir. My one attempt to get someone else hooked by beginning with this one wound up with her complaining that she felt like the sections with Evayne were parts of an entirely separate book that had been inexplicably put into a book about Gilliam and Stephen. I didn't see it that way, but having read some of the others first, I had the advantage of knowing how those sections fit into the overall story.
I don't feel I can fairly evaluate The Hidden City as a beginning point, because I had already read all the others multiple times before I read it and I think it gave me a very different reading experience than if I were new to the world. I also have concerns about the fact that The Hidden City is part of a series that will eventually move forward to events after The Sun Sword, which could result in confusion in readers who had not read that series.
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regna
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Date: 2010-01-09 17:52 (UTC)However, the problem with Hunter's Oath as a starting point is that, in many ways, it seems to me that the entire book is merely a prologue to Hunter's Death. A necessary prologue, certainly, and I enjoy it a great deal, but it doesn't have a real ending of its own and much of it is background on Breodanir. My one attempt to get someone else hooked by beginning with this one wound up with her complaining that she felt like the sections with Evayne were parts of an entirely separate book that had been inexplicably put into a book about Gilliam and Stephen. I didn't see it that way, but having read some of the others first, I had the advantage of knowing how those sections fit into the overall story.
I don't feel I can fairly evaluate The Hidden City as a beginning point, because I had already read all the others multiple times before I read it and I think it gave me a very different reading experience than if I were new to the world. I also have concerns about the fact that The Hidden City is part of a series that will eventually move forward to events after The Sun Sword, which could result in confusion in readers who had not read that series.