by Tad Williams
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Product Description
With their father and brother taken from them, the royal Eddon twins Barrick and Briony have done their best to hold the kingdom together. But now Barrick has been captured in a failed war against the immortal Twilight People, and Briony has been forced to flee the castle.
Everywhere in the north the fierce Twilight People, led by the ageless warrior- witch Yasammez, hold sway. Old magics are stirring beneath the ancient castle and behind the Shadowline, and the machinations of gods, fairies, and mortals threaten to spread devastation across the entire world.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Shadowplay, 2008-06-14
Its a fun book, but you have to read the first book to know what's going on.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Great Sequel, 2008-05-21
The second book keeps you just as interested as the first. The story line gets quite a bit more twisted around and many of the plots from the first are addressed and expanded on. Definitely worth the buy if you enjoyed Shadowmarch.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 An Improvement Over the First Book in the Trilogy, 2008-05-09
Author Tad Williams' second installment in the Shadowmarch trilogy shows definite improvement over the first, the latter of which left me somewhat unimpressed.
Here, Briony continues her flight from Southmarch and the family who have all but usurped her family's throne. In the process, she's rescued from starvation and the predations of the wilderness by a demigoddess (somewhat reminiscent of Geloe, of "Memory, Sorrow and Thorn"), eventually joining up with a traveling troupe of entertainers whose day job may be acting, but some of whose members have a more cloak-and-dagger midnight shift. Barrick travels with Capt. Vansen and Gyir, the latter bizarre by even fairy standards, and has an unfortunate meeting with a demigod of his own. We encounter captive King Olin at last, a prisoner in a reputedly impregnable city, as the mad Autarch batters at the walls, putting the city's claim to the test. Finally, the Minstrel Tinwright, ever the opportunist, finds being court minstrel to the usurpers a bit more dangerous than he thought, especially since he becomes romantically entangled with the concubine of one of the more ruthless of them - a lady who asks Tinwright to assist her in escaping her captor through death. The mysterious fairy folk, called the Qar, have all but vanished into the city surrounding Southmarch castle - their presence undetected, but the castle under siege nonetheless.
William's character development picks up in this second installment, and it's a welcome change from the first. While Barrick continues to be as annoying and whiny as in the first, Briony comes into her own and is turning into quite an interesting character - not at all the minor role I expected her to play. Tinwright, though unctuous and opportunistic, finds himself squirming in a trap of his own making - and is also proving to be one of the more interesting characters in the series, his moral ambiguity belying the tendency of William's characters to be somewhat two dimensional as regards their morality. Less emphasis is placed on the Qar, with the exception of Gyir, perhaps the most interesting of the Qar aside from the changeling Kayyin, formerly the halfwit Gil. This lack of focus actually benefits the story, as I never found the fairy army a particularly menacing threat from the beginning. The shift in focus in book two from the Funderlings to the sea people is also a benefit, the Funderlings being a bit too much rock-candy-coated Oompa-Loompas compared to the ambivalent natures of the sea folk. Still weak are the Autarch, whose Nero/Caligula-esque behavior seems all too much stock fare relative to someone of Williams' talent, and Chert, the hen-pecked Funderling who seems more a dwarven version of "Step-and-Fetch-It" to be truly credible beyond a fantasy allegory to the old negro stereotype.
All said, a strong follow-up to a weak beginning. Here's hoping the final book follows suit.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 Needed an editor, badly!, 2008-05-08
My wife and I are both big Tad Williams fans, and so we started this series with a high level of excitement. The first volume we got as a regular paperback, and it was a little disappointing: the world-building was not nearly as brilliant as many of his previous books, we found the twins a little annoying, and a lot of TW's sentences were crazily convoluted. However, it was gripping enough to go out and get us to buy book 2 in this trade paperback form. We should have waited. DO NOT BUY THIS VERSION OF BOOK 2. It is rife with errors, both typos and errors in content. For example, it will say Chaven said something, when it should have said Chert, or it will have a character wake up from his sleep on one page, and still be asleep on the next page. And the sentence structure didn't get any better. Some sentences have an entire separate paragraph's worth of description in the middle, separated from the rest of the sentence just by commas. Both the errors and convoluted sentences made the book hard to follow at times, and even when the meaning was clear, they detracted from the pleasure of reading it. Hopefully an editor will belatedly come along and salvage this book before they print the next edition, and hopefully Book 3 will be put together with more care before it is foisted onto the public.
That being said, a crappy Tad Williams book is still better than a lot of stuff out there, so I can't give it less than 2 stars.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
uneven but readable, 2008-03-07
I started reading this series and found some of the imagery and concepts compelling. First the criticism. Some of the story is tedious, as some characters we follow lack any apparent point commensurate to all the time spent on them. There can be times when poor editing might distract from the story, lines like "...the echoes echoed..." and the like. I found a number of spelling errors too. Also, a major character is apparently killed off and the reader is informed after the fact, 'so and so is dead', which in my opinion was a missed opportunity. If the author had removed some of the tedious stuff and developed moments like this instead, we would have a stronger story. The end of book 2 brings a merger of two main characters/storylines and the start of their journey north, seems a bit too contrived even for fantasy genre. At times it seems like we've gone so far off on tangents that to clean things up enough to get to book 3 some corners are cut. Again, some boring stuff could have been removed and relevant passages expanded.
Having said that, some of the book IS absolutely great and the author creates an amazingly detailed world for us, with compelling characters. For all the rough patches and boring bits, the good parts overcome this reader's occasional apathy and make the saga well worth the effort.
Waiting for 3rd book.
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