The Crow: The Third Book of Pellinor (Pellinor Series) (original 2006; edition 2007)

Book three of Croggon's Pellinor series, this installment follows the adventures of Hem and his new companions, Irc (a white crow he rescues) and Zelika, a refugee fleeing the front lines after the destruction of her city. Hem has to grow up considerably in this story and he discovers something about the part he must play in the final confrontation with the Nameless One.

Since it had been over a year between Book Two and Book Three, it took a couple of chapters to get back into the story. However, without being too heavy-handed about it, Croggon included enough back story in the first chapters to pull me back into the world she has conjured into being. While this is YA (Hem is 12) it's at the more mature end of YA.

I have just finished to read the complete series and as I am a great epic fan I only can say that I loved these books and was finaly very sad when it came to an end. I thought all the books were very discriptive, the character development was great and the narrative of the books was wonderful. Alison Croggon is a great story teller as you could live the story with the characters. I have read the Lord of the Rings as well, but I've found no more parallels in this books than in any other fantasy novels. The books take you to very well described places and you can imagine them all as you go along, I found the books not boring at all and found it much more difficult to actually put them down. ( )

All novels, and especially fantasy novels, provide the opportunity for authors to create their own worlds in which to place their characters, and in large measure what makes the story convincing is the plausibility of that secondary world. Croggon's land of Edil-Amarandh is given credible substance by its characters' interaction with the geography, climate and changing seasons, and the success of The Crow and the other Pellinor books is enhanced by the impression that Maerad and Hem, Cadvan and Saliman are all inhabiting a real landscape: we are with them, almost in real-time, every step of their journeys, every rest in their tasks. It may or not help to imagine their world as perhaps that straddling what is now the mid-Atlantic ridge between Newfoundland and western Europe, sometime towards the end of the last Ice Age when sea levels were lower, but it is not essential, particularly as Croggon's storytelling skill provides the verisimilitude to convincingly transport us to this sprawling continent in the grip of unfathomable changes.

Fans of Maerad from the first and second books may baulk at a volume in which she gets only passing mentions, but her brother Hem becomes as fascinating and sympathetic a character as his sister in the course of nearly 500 pages. In many ways The Crow appears as a narrative reflection of The Riddle: they straddle the same time-frame, ending with each of the two siblings meeting up with a lost friend on Midwinter's Day; one sibling travels to the north-west, the other to the south-east to gain insights into the Treesong; both become imprisoned though in rather different circumstances, having to rely on their own inner resources; both discover they have gifts that they were not aware of; and both are rightly distressed when they lose significant friends. But The Crow is not just a mirror image of The Riddle, and the dangers Hem meets and his responses to events and predicaments are strikingly different from his sister's.

The Crow is an absorbing read, and while there are stretches where nothing much seems to happen, the inner turmoil and personal growth that Hem undergoes is as essential to Croggon's tale as any burst of action is to a more conventional sword-and-sorcery novel. Love and loyalty, beauty and poetry alternate with scenes of horror and destruction and cruelty; the feeling that one is there when Turbansk is besieged, when the child-soldiers are abused, when friends are separated or re-united is strong throughout these pages and re-inforces the reader's empathy and sympathy for the youngsters in the story as they grow old before their time. It is a harsh observer who doesn't engage with Hem and Irc, his friend the white crow. ( )

I wished it stayed with Maerad's POV, but oh well. ( )

The Crow by Alison Croggon was not my favorite of the 3 Books of Pellinor I've read, but it was still a great read. It was entertaining and sometimes even scary. And I cried once. And yes, I do tend to like books more when they make me cry! I think it's because the characters have to be well-written in order for me to connect with them at all. But more on that later.

The first 2 books in this series follow a young girl named Maerad and her friend Cadvan on their journey to find something called the "treesong." Book 3 changes direction a bit. It follows Hem, Maerad's younger brother. He has been brought to the Suderain, a land in the south, by his mentor Saliman. Their city, Turbansk, is under attack. The city's seige, Hem's escape, and Hem's travels deep into evil lands fill the pages of this story.

I found this book to be a bit slow in the beginning, but I chalk it up to the new characters. Maerad and Cadvan dominated the 1st 2 books, and I love them both dearly. So the character changes were definitely noticed. Once I got to know Hem, Saliman, and the others from The Crow (Hem and Saliman we actually meet in earlier books, we just don't know them too well), this book went a lot faster. My favorite character has to be Irc, the white crow Hem nurses back to health. The things he says are priceless and made me laugh out loud. I also love how even when Irc is surrounded by evil and in danger of death, his obsession with shiny things is still in full swing, leading him to steal a pendant from the leader of the Dark. My other favorite character is Zelika, Hem's friend. She is spritely, spicy, and has a lot of attitude. She has a thirst for revenge and a lot a energy. I connected with her immediately.

All in all, this was a great read. If you've read books 1 and 2, read this one too. It's weird because Maerad and Cadvan aren't in it at all, but it's still fun to read, and fun to meet new characters. I especially loved seeing Hem's transformation from child in the beginning to young adult at the end. I can't wait to read book 4. ( )