Donald Aamodt

Aamodt, to judge by this and his earlier book in the same series, writes curiously bifurcated books. One the one hand, there's a genre-standard "person from our world becomes a fantasy hero" base that has been written a million times, and in this case is not written too well -- I could have done without the n-th description of the main characters' squabbles. On the other hand, there are moments when he escapes from this narrative into strange, extra-planar journeys into strangeness that then return with a jolt to the "ordinary" fantasy, giving it a crucial element of defamiliarization. Those moments make this book / series worth reading if you've read a lot of genre fantasy and are looking for more.… (more)