Shadowline

Beware, you are entering a dark and scary universe. (Well, of course you are, it’s a Glen Cook book ;) ) We’ve got: an empire of slave raiders, mercenary captain-kings, space warfare, planetary surface warfare, betrayals and more betrayals, lovely back-stabbing families, torture and more torture, cold-blooded murder, just plain “I hate you, you bastard” murder, cycles of vendetta that take years and years to complete. Did I get it all down? Phew.

I always like that Cook’s writing is so deceptively plain and simple. But it’s masterful, really – just a few strokes of a pen, and there is your character, and there is nothing simple about her or him; there is your battle, unfolding, and you can feel it all happening.

It’s been show more a while since I read anything by Glen Cook, so it was nice to revisit his work. I still like the Black Company books best of all, but I ended up enjoying this one a lot. I had trouble getting into the story at first and decided that it was going to be a three star read, at most – I was annoyed by Pollyanna. “Is this character misogyny personified, author, what are you doing?” As the novel progressed, it turned out that Cook was messing with the readers (of course he was). Pollyanna was frighteningly damaged, complex, and badass when it mattered. Well done, author, well done. There were a couple of instances of very weird gender stuff, and the book as a whole is very male-centric. But I am usually able to cut older sci-fi some slack.

Imagine my happiness when a lightbulb lit up in my head: OMG, Glen Cook is retelling Norse mythology as a space opera!!! Cool! Awesome! I love this kind of literary game, I was jumping for joy. It’s all there: Odin and his ravens, Thor, Loki and his many treacheries, Fenrir the wolf, Balder’s death, etc etc etc. Is there Ragnarök, too? Of course.

The ending was a bit rushed, but I am very curious about the rest of the series. I am not in a hurry, though – the story of Shadowline is complete.

I’ll end with one of the best quotes:

“How we love to play at being paladins,” he thought. “Hired killers pretending to knights of the Round Table. Dragons slain. Maidens rescued. Ogres dismantled. No, no, that’s not really innocent blood taking the shine off the old armor. Just a spot of rust.” show less

I've enjoyed almost everything by Glen Cook I've read so far but this one was painful to get through. Uninteresting characters battle uninteresting villains and do other uninteresting things in an uninteresting yet byzantine setting. Thankfully, most of the characters are dead by the end of the story, so I can move on to volume 2 not dreading that we will learn more of their exploits.

2.5 stars. Some good ingredients and atmosphere, some memorable characters, balanced by an inbred plot line, some unhelpful ellipses, and very poorly drawn female characters. Possibly I’ll read the next one, but if I do it’ll be a while.

Story of a hardened mercenary Gnaeus Storm brought into an unwanted conflict by schemes of both his brother Michael and mysterious Sangaree Deeth. Soon old grudges will surface and families will clash, brother against brother, family against their own, revealing plot within plot – resulting in death of almost entire Storm family – and most probably end of standalone mercenary armies. Masato Storm – The Mouse – will survive the onslaught only to continue this never ending vendetta against the Sangaree who brought death to his family.

Reads like a classic Greek tragedy – story of revenge that only brings doom to participants. Glen Cook is great as always.
I cannot wait to see what happens in the Starfisher trilogy #2 and #3.

Great show more book, recommended. show less

Wow, Mr. Cook, you really let me down! Normally, I enjoy your books immensely—from the Black Company to the Garrett stories—but this one was so puerile I couldn't read it. I ended up skimming the last 1/3 just to find out how the story ended and then recycled the book. I will not be continuing the trilogy.

This was worth the read. I'm not yet sure I'll pick up the other books in the series, but probably will. A good story with multiple plot lines and a few exotic environments. I finished with the feeling that more could have been done with this one set of stories ... enough to make a few books of them ... but that at least the story was mostly resolved, so not bad at all.

Atrociously bad. No characters, almost no plot, and poor writing.

There were no interesting or sympathetic characters. None of them seemed even human. They were all some combination of grim, cold, cruel, or vapid; and uniformly two-dimensional. The plot (such as it was) was about a feud between two feudalistic families, but I didn't care one bit what happened. And because of the bad writing, I was confused much of the time.

Don't waste your time on this.