They say that familiarity breeds contempt. I must say that this is true with my relationship with the late David Eddings. The more I read him, the less I like him.

I received The Belagariad and The Malloreon (each in two-volume sets) for Christmas, unprompted, and managed to get through the Belgariad with no problems, other than my distaste for the very strong racist themes in the book.

In the Malloreon, at least, the first three books, the racist themes are still present, but so are even more sexist themes. It doesn't matter that the party, the same cast as the Belgariad, consists of the worlds greatest sorceress, the most powerful Queen in the West, and one of the greatest female spies known, when it comes to making dinner or doing laundry or other stereotypical activities, guess who does it.

The plot is effectively a rehash of the plot of the Belgariad. Garion must travel some place, and defeat the Child of Dark. Been there, done that.

Likewise, much like its predecessor, it relies HEAVILY on this mysterious author's outline called "the Prophecy." "Why are we waiting around in this place when we're in a hurry to kill the evil dudes? Oh, prophecy." "Why did you act atypically and out of character just now? Oh, prophecy."

It's a very, very weak way to "plot" a story, I think. If prophecies exist, well, that's fine. But don't make the characters total slaves to it, and acknowledge it every other page. It makes me feel like I'm reading a fantasy novel written by John Calvin.

Additionally, the writing in the Malloreon is much weaker than that of the Belgarion. In one scene, after the Murgo King leaves his kingdom on a boat to roll with the adventures (for various reasons), once the ship comes aground, the helpful Murgo sailors decide to cease being helpful, and try to KILL the party, including their King, to whom they're LOYAL. So, I guess the king helped kill his own people, or something. Eddings wasn't clear.

On that topic, the characters were more like characters in one of those RPGs where you have roughly seven billion different playable characters, but when they're not actually DOING anything, they disappear into the main character. It felt like that. While the party went on, one character or another would emerge from the character mass, say something in character, and then disappear until they were needed again to fulfill some aspect of the prophecy.

And another thing! Eddings tries to cleverly disguise some character as another, in which a major fail-whale beaches itself from the first introduction. I imagine that nobody else was surprised to find out who the mysterious juggler was. Or maybe I'm just sharper than most Eddings' readers.

To top it off, it's more of the same Tolkienoid fantasy, with pretty much the same cast, doing pretty much the same thing.

If you've read the Belgariad, you don't REALLY need to read the Malloreon. And if you've read Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, you don't really need to read anything written by Eddings. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a... ( )

Wonderful conclusion to the story. By the time I was reading this though some of the dialogue had gotten a bit repetitious. But that's okay, I still love the story and characters.