Storm Warning (The Mage Storms, Book 1) (original 1994; edition 1995)

THIS IS AN AUDIO BOOK REVIEW: NOT A REVIEW OF THE BOOK ITSELF. The series is a 4.5 to me. The Audio by Ledoux? A 1. I gave a three rating because I love the books themselves, but this narrator is definitely NOT mmy cup of tea!
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First, please realize that I am a huge fan of Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar tales. I started with The Last Herald Mage Trilogy in 1989 when the first came out and have them still on my bookshelves in paperback editions. I really enjoyed them, though my sight is making it hard to sit and read a physical book these days. I now read on my Nook or Kindle where the back-lighting and ability to make the type larger really helps.

My favorite way to "read" though, is via Audio Books. I have been a member of Audible.com for years. So, I was thrilled when I pulled up my "Whats New" e-mail and saw "Storm Warning: The Mage Storms, Book 1." However, now I am very sad, because the narrator is horrible. David Ledoux may be a good reader for certain books and apparently Joe Hill liked him for "You Will Hear the Locust Sing: A Short Story from '20th Century Ghosts'" and I really like Joe Hill. But the tone of his voice just seems totally wrong for Mage. He comes across as flat affected and droning, and when he tries to get into vocal character, he simply seems overdone. His sentences come across as choppy, instead of smoothly conversational.

Gregory St. John does "The Last Herald Mage" for Mercedes Lackey and Audible (well, the first two. Apparently the third in the trilogy is not available on Audible, and there is no indication of whether it will become available or not). He does a wonderful job and I truly wish that he had done Mage. I would have been happy to re-invest in the series if so. Ledoux? Not so much.

If you get the opportunity to read these series and love sword and sorcery, try these books. Sadly, though, not on Audio. ( )

As much as I dislike the Mage Winds trilogy, I like the Mage Storms trilogy. Karal is a great viewpoint character - foreign enough to bring some interesting background and insight into the familiar Valdemar court, naive enough to grow and change in satisfying ways, but neither self-pitying nor ineffectual. Not all of the others are quite as successful, but in this book they pretty much don't come into play.

Just like Valdemar is an idealized fantasy of liberal politics, the "true" Vkandis faith is an ideal of liberal religion. A character at one point actually pretty much quotes Aslan's "naming of Names" speech from the Last Battle. It meshes well with the rest of the series's worldview, and adds a little more depth to the otherwise militantly agnostic setup. ( )

Another rather dull synopsis from GoodReads, and something of a misleading one. Selenay isn't so much struggling to bring about an alliance with Karse as she already has one, as evidenced by the envoy, Ulrich, and his secretary, Karal, staying at the palace. Better to say that the story actually revolves around the Karsite envoy's secretary for the most part, while everybody tries to figure out what to do about Hardorn now that Ancar is dead and the Eastern Empire seems to be making a move toward them all.

Oh yes, and let's not forget that there are now catastrophic waves of magic circling the world, distorting the land and warping animals into rabid carnivorous monsters. Can't forget that.

This book was actually released about half a year after The Black Gryphon, which ties in well with this book, since while The Black Gryphon deals with the events leading up to the destruction of Ma'ar (we all remember him, don't we?) and the magical cataclysm that reshaped the world, Storm Warning deals with the temporal echoes of that cataclysm, the waves of magic coming back and doing ever-increasing damage.

The key to discovering all this, and a way to help keep some of the damage to a minimum, is hidden in An'desha's memories of Falconsbane and his previous incarnations, and understandably, delving into those memories is no easy task for someone who's terrified that merely having the memories at all is a sign that Falconsbane is still lurking in his mind. While An'desha does spend a good chunk of the book being rather whiny about the whole thing, I think some of that whininess and fear can be forgiven, even if it did make for annoying reading at times.

Through Karal, we get an insider's perspective on Karsites and Karsite religion, previous villified in just about all of the Valdemar novels. Mostly we get to see all this through comparisons, as now Solaris is the religious leader of the country and she's made some sweeping reforms. Or it might be more accurate to say "returns", since a lot of what Solaris did was take the religion back to its less terrifying and political roots, making the religion into what it apparently was supposed to have been for generations. It's through the now/then comparisons that we see what happens when power-hungry politicians control religion (and vice versa), an oppressive past regime versus a more lenient current regime.

Happily (at least from a reader's standpoint on realism), this didn't mean that everyone now views Karsites and inherently good. Generations of prejudice die hard on both sides of the border. The Valdemar novels are known somewhat for their idealism, but it's good to thrown in some nice sobering reality now and then. Keeps things believable, keeps people acting like people instead of actors in a moral play.

We also get to see another cultural perspective from Tremane's point of view as part of the Eastern Empire. The Empire is expansive and hard, but in its way, not really cruel or unjust. It takes over turbulent lands and brings order to them, brings employment and safety and security to the populace. Whether they want it or not. Hardorn's citizens, no matter how much they were beaten down by Ancar's regime, seem bound and determined to fight against the Eastern invasion of their land, to the point where it seems to make no sense to Duke Tremane. Isn't he offering them a chance to rebuild their homes and improve them? Isn't he bringing with them a better justice system that has proved well for other lands? It's a real treat to get to see so many variying cultural standpoints here, which of course thrills the amateur anthropologist in me.

Also interesting in this book is the attempt to apply the rules of physics to magic. I have a friend who disdains most fantasy because she says that magic is all too often used as a McGuffin. It can do anything, it has no rules attached to it, and it's entire unbelievable. (I always reply that she must be reading some truly crappy fantasy, because not all fantasy contains magic, and most of the stuff that does has clearly defined rules attached to it...) In Storm Warning, we get to see two opposing viewpoints, one stating that magic is entirely intuitive and its use is limited only by what the caster can imagine, and the other stating that magic must conform to the rules that the entire rest of the world has to go by, like physics. Unsurprisingly, it turns out that magic's real function is a mix of the two sides of the debate, but it was certainly nice to see Lackey lay down some really solid rules about how magic can and cannot work in relation to the more mundane aspects of the world.

This book loses a few marks for being very repetitive, however. Fascinating story, and Lackey does have something of a talent for being able to make characters essentially have the same discussion numerous times without it getting too boring, but there were times where it felt like all the recap discussions were little more than padding. Sometimes they brought something new and interesting to the mix, but other times it was entirely for the sake of characters catching up on what had happened, and could have been avoided and shortened by just stating that so-and-so gave a run-down of the situation to another character.

Still, a good beginning to what promises to be a very interesting trilogy. Magic and politics all rolled into one fascinating and multi-layered story, pieces of the familiar combined with the strange and new. It's classic Lackey work that explores her world in greater detail than ever before, fleshing out not only characters but an entire planet of people and cultures, that will leave you hungry for the next book. Highly recommended to Valdemar fans, though I recommend if you haven't already read the Mage Winds trilogy, do so before tackling this. Not doing so might leave you pretty confused as to who everyone is and what they're doing there in the first place. ( )

If you're trying to decide to buy this book, I think it comes down to two questions. If you're new to Lackey or the Valdemar books, should you start here? For me that's a decisive no. Go back and at try Arrows of the Queen, and if you like that, finish Talia's trilogy and move on to Elspeth's story beginning in Winds of Fate.

OK, so you've read those two trilogies? Then the question becomes, do you want to continue on and invest in this trilogy? I'd say yes. I didn't like this trilogy as much as the other Valdemar books published before this one: the two trilogies spoken of above and Vanyel's story, my favorite, that begins with Magic's Pawn. But if you've come this far, yes, this is like visiting with old friends and making new ones.

I liked seeing Valdemar from an outside, and particularly Karsite perspective, that of their traditional enemies. Karal provides that outside perspective, and he's an appealing character that propelled me nicely through the book. ( )

I wanted to read about Tremane, but the story really starts here, although this book is mostly Karal and An'desha. Tremane is established as a character, put in place, and takes a couple actions (some of which have far-reaching effects), but doesn't really develop in Warning. Karal and An'desha both do a heck of a lot of growing up in here, though. An'desha does most of his in one burst at the end - a single confrontation and a long walk (described from the outside) through his oldest memories, and he goes from submissive and regularly panicky to adult and independent. Though Karal's and Ulrich's work with him before certainly laid the groundwork, we don't really see him from the inside (no scenes from his POV) after he starts to develop. And for that matter, he may not be as grown-up as he acts at the end of the book. Karal is certainly _acting_ grown-up by the end of the book, but since most of the latter half is from his POV we know exactly how fragile and unprepared he feels while he's doing his grown-up act. On the other hand, he does develop, both in behavior and in feelings, throughout the book - at the beginning he's a very naive boy, who suffers a lot of major shocks to his worldview and incorporates them as he develops. From Rubrik to his homesickness, from the gryphons to Altra, from working with An'desha to the disaster near the end (not saying what, that's a spoiler), Karal deals with what he learns and makes it part of his new worldview. Even if he does have a habit of thinking something's a dream until it's forcibly shown otherwise.... And at the end, he hangs on and does what's needed to provide an immediate solution. He still thinks of himself as a stand-in (in which attitude he persists in the next book, as I recall), but his actions are those of a responsible adult. Nice to see! Oh yeah, and there's minor matters like an invasion of Hardorn that might not stop at the border, the beginning of the Mage Storms that the entire trilogy is about, building alliance and friendship between two long-term enemies...little stuff like that going on in the background while all this character development is happening. It's really funny what catches my attention from reading to reading. ( )