Owlflight

UPDATE:
Screw this mind-fekkery. I am DUN at 73%!

FREEEDOOOM!!!!



And I am giving this book a new rating: 2 Supermassive Black Hole Stars .

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ONE STAR, cause there are no negative stars on GR

This book is one long INFO DUMP. It's so polluted with unnecessary details, it's almost unreadable. I would not have survived the printed version and I am barely surviving the audio one. It's a wonder I haven't fallen asleep at the wheel ...yet.

I am having a strong urge to DNF at 67%. So far only two things had happen: the invasion of Darion's village at 40% (-ish) and dog/griffin fight at 66%. There is no plot to speak of.

POVs jump around, at one point dissipating into nothingness and what we have on our hands is a long, boring, show more overly descriptive bestiary; long, boring overly descriptive history of each and every other creature we encounter; a good 10 minutes on potion making (why???); pages and pages on analyzing the poor, emoitonally abused boy's predicament ...and so on.

Will not continue with the rest of the trilogy. As a matter of fact, I don't think I will read another ML's book in the near (or not so near) future. show less

Owlflight is a coming-of-age fantasy story set on the far borders of Valdemar. Darian is a young orphan who has been apprenticed to the local wizard after his parents' disappearance in the Pelagirs. Darian isn't happy with his placement. He hasn't accepted his parents' deaths, and his future plans were to be a trapper like his parents were.

The Wizard Justin is an old man who was damaged fighting in a war. He doesn't have much magic left but is an adequate healer and can still forecast the weather most of the time. He long since recognized that Darian had magic and could be trained to take his place.

After Darian runs away in anger after a conflict with Justin, he sees his town being invaded by barbarian raiders and sees Justin die show more defending a bridge against the raiders. Darian flees into the forest not knowing what to do.

Darian is rescued by a group of Hawkpeople who are in the area to try to build new nodes of magic after the Mage Wars disrupted the flow of magic in the world. They are also hunting the change beasts created by the same magic.

Darian finds acceptance and friendship and even reconciles to being trained to use his magic. But before he can embrace his future, the barbarian raiders have to be driven from the town he lived in, and the locals need to be rescued. Luckily, his knowledge of traps gained from his parents have the small group of Hawkpeople defeat a much larger horde and their mage too. show less

I love this book because it was not just a coming of age book, but because both Dixon and Lackey bring to life the village he lived in, reference some of the primary players in the kingdom of Valdemar in the second circling of the cataclysm, but bring in new players.
It brings to life the Tayledras and the establishment of a Vale, but more than that brings to life things only hinted at in the final book of the Mage series written about Vanyel.
The Northerners come south searching for more power to steal from the stupid humans who must tend the soil and are not men enough to hunt for a livlihood of their own.
It explains more about the dangers of the change circles and the devestation after the 2nd Cataclysm that must be cleaned up,
And show more most of all it brings to life the pettiness of people who have problems feeling left out and abandoned by their Kingdom, dealing with someone who does not fit the rest of the villager's ideals and how they unwittingly hurt and nearly destroy someone with good intentions.
A mage sacrifices himself, a boy with the help of the Tayledras and their traveling companions, the hertasi and dyheli and a griffon manage to save them and set them free.
A fun ready, lots of action and totally appealing characters, even the misguided villagers who can't understand anything different from themselves. show less

Read: ~2005
Reread: 12/31/23
My first reread of this trilogy since high school!

Having just read the Mage Storms trilogy before diving into the Owl Mage trilogy I have realized that Lackey's writing style is very slice of life and telling. We follow our characters as they do simply every day tasks while they think through every single detail of the past and their feelings and what they should do about those details so we are told how they feel and we should feel. I don't hate this, but its good to know for those that haven't read much Lackey and are interested in checking it out.

Darrion is a typical orphaned and mistreated fantasy main character who ends up in extraordinary circumstances. I love reading Valdemar for that trope, so it isn't show more a negative for me. Darrion is pretty whiney for the first half of this book, but we get a lot of context to help us remember he is a child dealing with trauma and are able to accept him with the context. show less

Good story. After the grand, world-saving sweep of Storms, we get a trilogy about some ordinary people dealing with the world post-Storms - mages dealing with the change in magic, everybody dealing with the strangeness left behind by the Storms, and everybody dealing with the changes in their lives from the war with Ancar - those who didn't come back, and the changes in what can be done because of that. It's set in a tiny village on the extreme west of Valdemar, which had no healer until a mage injured in the war came to help them; also, between the damage done by the physical storms and the new threats in the Forest, their economic base has gotten a lot weaker. The hero is a boy whose parents hunted the Forest, until they didn't come show more back; now he's, reluctantly, apprenticed to the mage. That's the setting. Then an attack by an army of northern barbarians, the involvement of a band of Tayledras who were nearby, Darian's (the boy) blossoming, and a new arrangement between Valdemar and the Tayledras, for this far-western area. The book stops there; the story could have, but doesn't. This is my third or fourth reread of the trilogy; this part of the story is necessary foundation, but it's not as good as the next two books. So merely good, not great.

Reread - Rich story, as usual. I had forgotten how much we get from Justyn's perspective - his history, and him thinking about Darien. If the attack hadn't come, Darien's life _might_ have gotten better anyway. But not as good as it did - allies and friends, respect (from them and from Errold's Grove), and even a partner. I was triggered to reread this by the song (In Errold's Grove), which so perfectly encapsulates how Errold's Grove sees him and themselves... Frustrating. So I wanted to read the trilogy and see the bigger picture. show less

When I first read this series I thought it was rather sweet and *understanding* and while there is a certain degree of that, this time through, Darien's introduction to life and it's knocks felt more realistic than usual with Lackey's books (within the obvious limits of course :-)).

By this point, of course, Lackey and Dixon were well up on the history of Valdemar and it was nice to see life in the country from the ordinary citizen's perspective and how they treat those who don't fit in to the niches they are assigned.

While in general this book shares the faults of all of the Larry Dixon-coauthored books - clunky writing, excessive description, melodrama - I actually dislike it the least. That's not saying much, mind, but it's not totally terrible.

The look at Valdemar post-mage storms is definitely interesting, and I wish it had stayed closer to Valdemar proper instead of mostly being a Hawkbrothers book. But it's a reasonable YA adventure story, and if it drags in places at least it gets somewhere.