A nice little romance. I enjoyed the humor in the way the book uses fairytale clichés, but the story and storytelling are a little too simplistic. This gives the book a sort of childish charm but gets annoying, especially at the end where the "and they all lived happily" stuff is told in a little too much detail. ( )

This third book in the 500 Kingdoms series was probably my least favourite of the four. A pleasant read, with likeable characters, but too many disparate elements for my liking, without anything to tie them together. This did not leave a strong impression. ( )

Lackey's third book in the "Tales of The Five Hundred Kingdoms" series, is similar to the previous two, yet falls just short of their success. In Fortune's Fool we meet Sasha the seventh son of the King of one of the dry land Kingdoms. He is known as his traditional role as the Fortune's Fool...the joke of the kingdom who also falls into luck often. We meet Katya, the seventh daughter of the Sea King, who is a spy and gets to go on many adventures for her father. She has a rare ability to be able to walk on dry land as easily as she can swim through the seas. Katya enjoys her missions as much as Sasha enjoys his rounds of the kingdom for his father, the chances to get away from the act he has to employ as the "fool". Katya and Sasha no sooner meet and begin to court, than she is called away on another mission from her father. When she is kidnapped, Sasha begins his own rescue mission to find her. This is a fun, quick read that I actually saved for awhile, knowing it would be good. And I wasn't disappointed. I liked the characters and the story was much in the same pattern as the previous two. However, the story did fall slightly short. I think that the couple's courtship was far too short before she was taken away. I also think Sasha could have benefitted from more adventures on his way to find her. The resolution was fun, but also too short and sweet. The epilogue was the best part of the story and I would have been happy to have seen some of the things discribed in the epilogue in more detail as well. Still, this remains a fun, strong series. I hope Lackey plans more books after the fourth "The Snow Queen". ( )

The seventh son of a seventh son and the Sea King's seventh daughter, Sasha and Katya are fated to the be traditional Fools of fairy tale reality. As such, both have very specific roles to play, because in the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Tradition reigns supreme, backed (and sometime thwarted) by the Godmothers. But both Sasha and Katya have learned to deal very well with the often tricky workings of Tradition - bending it to their wishes as much as it is possible to do. Now the pair will have their work cut out for them: Katya has been taken prisoner by an evil Jinn, and Sasha and two very unlikely Champions may be her only hope.

I've always liked Lackey's work, but this particular tale doesn't stand up well to the tight writing and suspense of the majority of her Valdemar novels. Nor does it use the many layers of folk mythology packed between its pages as well as her earlier Five Hundred Kingdoms books. It really feels more as if she was trying to stuff in creatures and bits from as many traditions as she could - and possibly as if she'd been up way too late watching InuYasha reruns. This particular tale just isn't up to par. ( )

Woo, what a clunker. The ideas were good but the editing was bad. Too much exposition, not enough cutting of extraneous words. It was a fun, light, lovely story with a somewhat confusing plot structure: the whole thing was wrapped up only halfway through the book, and then a whole other unrelated plot device was grafted on out of the blue in order to make the second half of the book, like 2 novellas joined at the middle. It reads like an early book, not a recent one. I normally like this author, so I wish her editor had done more reshaping. ( )