I stumbled across Katherine Kurtz's first novel, Deryni Rising, when I was exactly the right age: thirteen, a year younger than one of the main characters in the book. At the time I thought the fourteen-year-old king was the main character; only later, rereading the book from the perspective of my own increasing age, did I realize it's really about the 29-year-old Duke Alaric Morgan, halfbreed of a detested and distrusted race of sorcerers and one of the flat-out coolest characters I've run across in a fantasy novel.
I tore through the three volumes of the Chronicles of the Deryni, and hunted down the Legends of Saint Camber trilogy as well--a prequel series that I didn't like as much, largely because it had to lead into the vicious persecution of Deryni described as historical fact in the other series, written first but set two hundred years later. So as a fan, I was personally a little disappointed when I heard that Kurtz had chosen to postpone writing a Childe Morgan trilogy (even though I didn't know any more about it than the name) in favor of three more thoroughly depressing Heirs of Camber novels, in which nearly all the sympathetic characters die wretchedly.
And now she's finally come around to the Childe Morgan series I've been waiting for, leading up to the events described in her very first novel. And I have to admit I'm disappointed in them.
I suppose they could never have lived up to my hopes for them. But it just seems like this one in particular, the second in the series, is just a place holder. An Amazon reviewer described it as a collection of characters in search of a plot; I also got the impression that really not much happened except some traveling back and forth.
I tore through the three volumes of the Chronicles of the Deryni, and hunted down the Legends of Saint Camber trilogy as well--a prequel series that I didn't like as much, largely because it had to lead into the vicious persecution of Deryni described as historical fact in the other series, written first but set two hundred years later. So as a fan, I was personally a little disappointed when I heard that Kurtz had chosen to postpone writing a Childe Morgan trilogy (even though I didn't know any more about it than the name) in favor of three more thoroughly depressing Heirs of Camber novels, in which nearly all the sympathetic characters die wretchedly.
And now she's finally come around to the Childe Morgan series I've been waiting for, leading up to the events described in her very first novel. And I have to admit I'm disappointed in them.
I suppose they could never have lived up to my hopes for them. But it just seems like this one in particular, the second in the series, is just a place holder. An Amazon reviewer described it as a collection of characters in search of a plot; I also got the impression that really not much happened except some traveling back and forth.
Originally posted at MySpace 1/7/07
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