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The Long Price: Shadow & Betrayal (A Shadow In Summer & A Betrayal In Winter) (The Long Price Quartet, (2000)

by Daniel Abraham(Favorite Author)

3.81 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Science Fiction Book Club

review 1: I sit here with tears streaming down my cheeks, having just finished the last book in The Long Price Quartet, and I don't know what to write here except that I can't remember ever reading a story so beautiful. It took my breath away. I started this series over a month ago, and while it has been a long read, never has any story been more worth it. Daniel Abraham writes with a beauty, grace, talent, and real love for the story and the characters he creates that very few authors can match. Although I am fairly new to his writing, it did not take long for me to realize that Abraham is perhaps one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. If you want lots of flash, glory and page filler, go read another book. If you want to be profoundly moved to core of you... morer being, THIS is the book you want. This is a story that will amaze you, make you laugh, make you cry real tears of joy and pain and loss, and most importantly, it is a story that will stay with you a lifetime. 5 star rating for each book in this series.
review 2: Above average fantasy much keener on mannerpunk and emotion than it is on the copious swinging of swords. Which makes a nice change for me.I have a few niggling points regarding the beginning of the first book. The mountain academy in particular did seem to be something of an over-engineered solution for selecting poet-adepts and surely it could at least be built somewhere closer to the Dai-kvo? He's described as the busiest man in the world later in the book and I'm sure if I was even half as industrious and a tenth as powerful I could do without trekking across half a continent to inspect some kid. Likewise, it struck me as just a bit too convenient that a powerful businessman would select a random employee to accompany him to major plot-point A.That however is extremely petty nit-picking. By and large the world and the cities of Saraykhet and Machi are places full of life, colour and their own very interesting local politics. The major characters are all essentially good people (a healthy change from the dark grey and downright nasty ones I'm used to) and it is the way in which they act to bring about the result they each believe to be the most moral based on their principles. This is hardly a unique theme in literature but I liked the way it was brought very much to the forefront of this novel and how the plot is totally driven by it. The conflicting principles of different characters (even if these characters rarely to never interact) will each have huge effects on the outcome of the series of terrible events.The characters are all rich and develop well throughout the novel. My favourite (and certainly the one I admired the most) was Amat. It's quite amazing to watch an old lady with a dodgy hip single-handedly unearth and expose a terrible plot and get the better of a nasty villain along the way as a side-project.The characters of Seedless and Stone-Made-Soft - the Andat - were also exceptionally well written by Abraham. There's something sublime to the kind of alien sophistication that Abraham gives them. I always found Seedless and Maati's conversations rich, frequently profound and always entertaining, constantly trying to second-guess the wit of the quicksilver Seedless. Stone-Made-Soft's almost imperceptible (would have been imperceptible if we weren't reading from Cehmai's POV) smiles and expressions were similarly impressively layered with wit and meaning.One slight further criticism is that the pacing does seem to lag occasionally and I would really have to force mysel' to pick the book up again of an evening or stay awake if it was late.Overall though, an excellent read. less

Download links for: The Long Price: Shadow & Betrayal (A Shadow in Summer & A Betrayal in Winter) (The Long Price Quartet,

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