By the Sword

Mercedes Lackey
Completed 11/9/2024, Reviewed 11/9/2024
3 stars

I have a mixed history with Mercedes Lackey.  I really enjoyed the Magic’s Pawn trilogy from the massive Valdemar series.  I had mixed feelings about the Oathbound trilogy.  Overall, I like many aspects of Lackey’s books, but sometimes, they just don’t come together for me as a whole.  That happened with this book as well.  It’s a standalone in the Valdemar series, although it relies on information from the previous eight books in the series, six of which are the two trilogies I mentioned above.  So I had some background for this book.  However, it just felt rather dull.

The story begins as a sumptuous feast with Kerowyn, aka Kero, and her father, brother, and brother’s fiancé, as well as many others.  The feast is attacked by the forces of an evil mage, killing her father, wounding her brother, and kidnapping the fiancé.  Most of the men are slaughtered.  Kero picks up her sword and tries to find the fiancé.  She comes across her grandmother Kethry and her partner Tarma who give her the sword named Need, a magic sword that helps woman in danger.  Kero rescues the fiancé, but realizes she is meant to be a warrior, not simply a wife, and leaves her brother to study under Kethry and Tarma.  After a while she joins a mercenary company fighting as needed, culminating in major campaign to keep Valdemar from being invaded.

Like the previous six books of Lackey’s that I read, this one has amazing world building.  Even though it’s been two years since the last Oathbound series, her storytelling style had me right back in their world.  Reading a Lackey novel is sumptuous for its prose, creating vivid descriptions of the characters and the world they are living in.  

The characters are also very well drawn.  Not only do we get a great sense of who Kero is, but other characters as well.  Daren, the third son of a king with whom Kero trains, is a perfect spoiled royal who seems to grow up but still doesn’t understand how Kero wants to be a soldier but not someone’s wife, namely, his.  Fortunately, he grows up and returns later in the book as a much more mature prince.  I also liked Eldan, a Herald from Valdemar, from whom Kero learns about the peace-loving people, and with whom she falls in love.  The conflict between her love for him and desire to continue to be a mercenary is well played out.  

While this book has all these positive things going for it, I found reading it to be a chore.  I liked the beginning, but the subsequent parts felt directionless.  This book is kind of a third-person diary, describing the life of Kero.  There is no real overriding arc.  It’s like several different stories about her bound in one book.  And the stories take a long time to play out.  This e-copy of the book didn’t have page numbers, and I was constantly wondering if this book was really five hundred pages, or much longer.  

I give this book three stars out of five.  It was one of those situations where the sum of the parts did not equal the whole.  I guess I never really cared about Kero, even though she was a kick-ass soldier and leader, in whose head we spend a lot of time.  I still think Lackey is a terrific writer, with great prose, world building, and character development.  This book just didn’t do it for me.