Title: The Shadow Of The Lion
Authors: Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint, and Dave Freer
Genre: Fantasy/ Alternate History
Publisher: BAEN
Price: $7.99

This book is 905 pages long. Plus glossary, list of characters, foods, etc.

Normally I condense the premise of a book into a sentence or two. That’s not really possible with this book. For starters, it has 10 main characters. And that’s just the good guys.

Throughout most of the book this isn’t much of a problem since they’re usually paired up, and once you reach the middle-ish part of the book, the story is strong enough to pull you along.

The problem is the beginning. You get introduced to each character separately. You know how most books do that, and it’s a good thing? Yeah, this book is 905 pages, remember? And you’re meeting 10 characters. It’s not easy to keep track of in the beginning, and the story hasn’t really started yet. Wait till about page 200 or 250, then you’ll be fine.

The idea is something of an alternate history of Venice. It’s set in the 1530′s, where religion is more or less based on magic, demons can take over world leaders, and mages can, and do, run amok.

The transitions between authors is relatively smooth. Since the POV changes scene by scene, you’re left with a stronger feeling of character than of “oh, this author’s writing this scene” since the authors’ voices are different to really help separate the characters’ voices.

However, there were a few issues.

1. Certain characters had a habit of using more modern slang. There were no references to modern… things… but the way certain characters spoke made it hard to remember that this was 16th century Venice.

2. There were a lot of “as you know”‘s. Irritating.

3. I noticed two slip ups that should have been cleared up before going to print. The way two items were described was very heavy handed in a “I’ll write this down for the first draft and fix it up later- oops, I forgot” kind of way. One was actually useful, however, as I didn’t know that laudenum is opium mixed with alcohol. Interesting tidbit.

4. Waaaay too many repeats. I don’t think this was a case of the authors assuming that the reader had forgotten what was said before, though. I think the authors just repeated themselves because they, themselves, forgot. This is a very long work, and there are three authors involved. It’s very easy for them to forget what has been said either by themselves or by one of the others.

I do think that they could have easily chopped off 100 pages or so by cutting out the as you know’s and repeats, and tightening the plot and characterization a bit. Several “incidents” weren’t necessary to the plot, and a few POVs could have been reduced.

The Shadow Of The Lion is the first book in a trilogy. It certainly serves as a stand alone in every respect but one. One of the romances ends more tangled than it is during the height of the story. While that romance was a big deal to me, as a reader, I did not find myself as enthralled by the story as I would like to be when reading a book that’s this long. I spent entire evenings mostly reading this book so that I could get through it and on to the next novel in my stack. I just don’t have any interest in picking up the next book in the series unless I run out of books to read, and can’t find the books that I actually want to buy.

I can recommend this book, but only as a “if you have the time, money, and inclination” recommendation. If you’re looking for an example of the pit falls of collaborative work aside from transitioning, go ahead and pick this up. But set aside plenty of time in your schedule before you do.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 10:58 pm and is filed under writer's review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.