An enjoyable read, I don't like this series as much as his Recluse series. I bought & kept all the books & have read them twice, though. ( )

A bog standard university music faculty member gets transported to a fantasy world. While no-one takes a second look at here there, in this world music drives magic, so she is potentially quite powerful.

That is, if she can survive in a male dominated ruthless feudal world, after her protector goes out of the picture, and a spell goes awry.

http://notfreesf.blogspot.com/2007/02... ( )

This is the first book in Modesitt's series, The Spellsong Cycle, about a singer from our world who is inadvertantly dragged into another world where singing controls magic.

I really liked the idea behind this book, and the basic story was good - I wanted to see how it ended. Unfortunately, it wasn't very well written. There were both spelling and grammer errors throughout that were more than just poor proofreading. The parts form the heroine's point of view were written in the third person, but the sections referring to inhabitants of that world were in the first person, which I found very distracting and irritating, pareticularly because they were typically only a page or two long and thrown in at random so you never had a chance to get used to the style. Not to mention that they seemed at times rather irrelevant and unnecessarily confusing to the story.

In general, I felt the narrative lacked depth and body to it - a lot of the book seemed very sparse and thin, like nothing was happening most of the time with speech just thrown in here and there. It's hard to describe - I think perhaps it just needed more description and in particular more character development. The heroine, Anna, was fairly well developed, but pretty much everyone else was very two dimensional or lacked a purpose completely. I felt this was particularly true of the character Daffyd, who should have been one of the main characters throughout the book yet didn't seem to have much purpose - he just seemed to trail along.

It would have benfited, too, from more background and/or explaination of the rules and structure of the magic in the world and the circumstances of her travel between the worlds. Generally there was a lot of background detail that was not investigated which could and perhaps should have been to give the book more grounding and a feeling of reality.

But despite this, I was caught up by the actual story which had a lot of potential. I wouldn't, however, choose to read any more in the series (or anything else by the same author). It was perfectly adequate as a standalone story, with no cliffhangers to entice you to read any further. ( )