Silverthorn

Silverthorn is the third (or second, depending on how you count Magician) book in Raymond E. Feist’s Riftwar Saga, the first subseries in the Riftwar Cycle. This one picks up about a year after the previous book left off. There’s one more book in the subseries, so this one wraps up the most immediate problem that our characters are focused on, but it leaves a lot of dangling threads waiting for resolution in the next book.

Silverthorn brought the Feist Nostalgia Factor back in full force. 20 years after originally reading the first several books in the Riftwar Cycle, Arutha and Jimmy still lived on in my head as my favorite characters from his books. This is the first book that focuses mainly on those two, and I loved spending time show more with them again. It also brings back the ensemble camaraderie in full force which is something I really enjoy.

Reading it with older eyes, decades after its original publication in the 80’s, I can see now that it’s a teensy bit melodramatic at times. Also, our supposedly-stoic characters get all sappy a bit more often than might be realistic. I think I’ve come to appreciate a little more subtlety and “understatedness”, and yet I can understand why my 20-something-year-old self loved this and my 40-something-year-old self can’t help but still love it. I’m giving this one 4.5 nostalgic stars and rounding up to 5 on Goodreads. show less

(Amy) And so I continue my re-read of the Riftwar books, with another book I'd apparently entirely forgotten. Go me and my LEET reading skillz, or at least those of some 15 years ago.

In this book, absolutely everything that irritated and bored me about Magician was absent. The pacing wasn't sluggish, the politics weren't overstated and overplayed, there were no tedious battle scenes, and no one was possessed by the spirit of a long-dead dragon lord. In short, a win! ...OK, that's a trifle flippant, but it's true in essence, nonetheless.

Herein, Arutha's wedding is rudely interrupted by an assassin who misses him and hits his bride instead, and so she spends all but the opening chapters stuffed in a closet somewhere (well, no, it's a show more bedroom, with a frozen-time spell so she won't die while people are trying to save her), and the other woman in the book throws a fit about Her Man going off with the group to save her, and then the boys all sneak out and quest for the McGuffin without any icky girls around.

...and it was still less annoying than Magician!

I'm joking, mostly. The boys' club nature of the thing doesn't actually bother me in any real sense, because that's just the way this type of story works, especially 20 years ago. Not only that, it's the way this type of world works, and if there'd been two or three butch grrls along on the quest I would probably have cried Bullshit! on it for that. It does seem like the women that are there (who at least have the potential to be real people, not just decorative plot devices, which is something) could have been a little less sidelined, though. Oh, well. It's actually a fairly minor quibble, as such things go. The next book will be along soon, and we'll see if it trips this particular trigger, too, hey?

( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/zenos-library/2009/07/silverthorn_raymond_e_f... ) show less

This was better than the previous 2 books as far as I'm concerned since it was more character driven. A band of men (why is it always men?) travel to find the silverthorn flower to make an antidote for the prince's not-quite-wife who was shot with an arrow meant for the prince at their wedding ceremony.

The thief, Jimmy was my favorite character in this. He was fully fleshed out. How he came to be a friend to the prince was fun as he had one foot in the thieves guild and the other in the palace.

Unfortunately, the book left a lot of things up in the air. I don't have the next book and I'm just not into this series enough. It did wrap up the silverthorn thread very quickly at the end making nit almost anticlimatic. It sets the scene for show more the next (last) book where the final (?) battle will take place against the Enemy who wants to destroy at least 2 world if not more.

Pug is in this book as well and will play a major role in the next book, I'm sure. show less

The first book in this trilogy was really a book onto itself. You could read that and never need another book for closure.

This one builds on the first and very much ends on a cliffhanger. The different characters are more stationary this time, with Jimmy as a positive outlier. Another character does one of those abrupt grow spurts again. There are a few jarring switches in tone and pace, but in general it’s an easy read. Fair warning, even more than in the first book, women exist to be rescued, or married, or to be moms in this book. Zero meaningful female characters.

It’s not perfect, but I enjoyed it, and I’m definitely reading the next book in the series.

So much fantasy goodness packed in this one. Even if the first two were complete in themselves, they still serve as perfect vessels to bring about a somewhat standalone adventure full of nearly all the characters we've grown to love. Even Pug has a role, but mostly we get to follow and love Jimmy the Hand and Arutha.

This is not a simple "find the freaking herb to save his love" quest no matter how simple the blurb makes it seem. Indeed, there's a lot of intrigues, big bads only hinted at in the first two novels, and evil much bigger than two worlds could handle even if they could band together.

No spoilers, but even this "nearly" standalone adventure has all the makings of epic greatness of a slightly different flavor from before show more despite the familiar characters. :) Indeed, it's the characters and the complicated plotting that makes this great.

So much set up for the next one! Completely necessary, of course. I remember Darkness VERY fondly from way back when. :)

Okay, so, I may not have loved this one nearly as much as the first two, but my complaints are few and far between. :) I can't see how it could improve other than combining books together into much larger tales for continuity. :) show less

The second book in Feist's Midkemia series, 'Silverthorn' focuses on Prince Arutha and his exploits as he rushes to save the life of his bride to be Anita. Arutha has found that he's the target of assassins after being saved from an ambush by the boy thief Jimmy the Hand and with the forthcoming wedding to Anita, he tries very hard to clear Krondor of the Nighthawk menace with the aid of the Upright Man, the head of the hidden Thieves' Guild. This attempt proves that the Nighthawks are not regular assassins, but pawns in the hands of a darker power as they refuse to remain dead! When, despite all their best efforts, Anita is struck down by a poisoned bolt, Arutha and his select companions find themselves in a race to find the titular show more Silverthorn, facing a horde of morodhel in the processs.

This is a much better book than the first one (in my opinion, of course) though it does show Feist's gaming roots as his protagonists are forced up against various opponents out of the D&D game books show less

Nothing wrong with it (well, the women characters could be stronger, but for the time, they could be a whole lot worse), but nothing great about it either. I was bored for most of the quest/journey, no real tension for I know Feist's style is to be gentle to his characters for the most part, and most of the book just felt like a weak travelogue to me. Despite Arutha being one of my favourite characters, he wasn't compelling enough in this book to hold that post. Nobody really stood out as being that deserving of a reader's love and loyalty.