レビュー

• Good Fantasy is very hard to find

  It could be that being an older reader of Fantasy has made me far more judgmental of fiction than I was when I first started reading at the age of thirteen. At that tender age, just feeling the words across the page was enough to get my imagination running. Twenty-seven years of reading whatever Fantasy I can find has to make me at least somewhat knowledgeable about what makes good Fantasy fiction. I turn away from far too many Fantasy novels after only a few chapters. Good Fantasy is terribly difficult to find. Acacia is one of the good ones. In a word, it is Exquisite. Dense is another word I'd use. I mean nothing bad by using that word. By Dense I mean only that the book has some dialog but not as much as other books. A writer who can engage a reader with Dense writing is a very good writer. (Robert Jordan, anyone? He's one of the good ones and his books are as Dense as they come. But he's good at it. David Anthony Durham is also very good at it.) I could say so many things about Acacia. Most good, a few not so good. I have some particular language hang-ups that I find in just about every book I read. The word "that" is used far too often. Ninety percent of the time "that" can be removed and the sentence still sounds fine. I really hate the word "Perhaps" when "Maybe" works just fine. If I ever read a Fantasy novel where some sweating barbarian dude with a sword uses the word "Perhaps", I'm done. That book is dead to me, but thanks for trying! There were many times in Acacia where I would have put a comma. But these are little personal hang-ups and mean nothing when evaluating the story itself, which is by far the most important thing. Aside from my personal language hang-ups, Acacia is an incredibly satisfying Fantasy novel. To compare it to Robert Jordan, which is not my focus, I just want to point out that David Anthony Durham's Acacia is far more human to me than Robert Jordan's work. I love Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. And I love David Anthony Durham's Acacia too, for different reasons. The character Corinn is by far my favorite character. The weaving of her story within the book is incredibly interesting and satisfying. I liked all the characters, but Corinn is a diamond. She will always stand out for me. I look forward to reading more about her in The Other Lands. As I said earlier, David Anthony Durham's prose is exquisite without being too much in the way. Writers who spend more time attempting to weave pithy, poetic sentences are very likely to lose readers. Most readers want to disappear in the story and not constantly have attention drawn to the words. I think David did a splendid job of walking that very fine line. I highlighted several passages while reading Acacia on my Kindle and want to share two quotes here. First quote: "It was so achingly pathetic a transformation that Corinn reached out to him." Beautiful sentence around a beautifully written scene. Next quote: "He was spending too much time in the past, he knew. It was hard not to, especially on an evening like this when the air seemed hushed with melancholy." Here you see David dancing around the line between tugging a reader's heart or making a reader throw up. Writing exquisite prose is not easy, and David gets an A+ in my book. Acacia has just the right feeling of Poetry to make it beautiful. I think the best review I can give is that--as a reader--I never felt like David was insulting my intelligence. A good writer trusts the reader. A good writer lets the reader figure out stuff on his own. If a writer tells me what I already know, I'm very likely to put the book down and never pick it up again. I think Acacia will likely find more success with older readers, but it will also work for intelligent, patient younger readers. I know we have lots of very intelligent young readers out there, so give this one a try if you love great Fantasy. They don't come along very often.

• Ein Juwel der epischen Fantasy

  Dieses Buch ist genau das, was man sich als Fan von "A Song of Ice and Fire" gewünscht hat: epische Fantasy, die sich nicht in seitenlangen, in Adjektiven ersaufenden Beschreibungen verläuft ("meine Fantasywelt ist so innovativ, dass ich unbedingt noch zwölf Absätze lang die Fauna dieses Landstrichs beschreiben muss), sondern von ihren originellen Charakteren und vor allem von der Story lebt. Durham, der seine Fähigkeiten bereits in früheren Romanen außerhalb des Fantasy-Genres bewiesen hat, überzeugt dabei mit flüssigem Stil und einer Erwachsenheit, die ihn meilenweit über dem Gros der modernen Fantasy-Schreiblinge thronen lässt, sie den Markt mit ihren ideenlosen (meist dreibändigen, auf mehr als 1500 Seiten aufgeblähten) Machwerken überschwemmen. Höchst empfehlenswert für jeden, der sich mal wieder eine anspruchsvolle Fantasy-Serie jenseits tumber Elfen-Ork-Geprügle gönnen will. Einzige Ausnahme: Wer GRR Martins "Game of Thrones" noch nicht gelesen hat, sollte unbedingt zuerst das Vorbild lesen, bei dem Durham zugegeben das eine oder andere Mal gespickt hat.

• Excellent worldbuilding

  I really liked the world of Acacia and the political structure built by Durham. The Acacian Empire is not benevolent although the people in it a highly likable... good book

• Acacia: A wonderful start to a saga

  I just finished reading Acacia and thought the book was great. First off, would like to say that the cover of the hardcover is very eye catching and makes you want to read the book. It pictured the Acacia tree perfectly and really helped set the stage for the story. The detail in the book is incredible and the author goes really in depth to the scenery. Sometimes it did make it seem to drag on, but it really helped put the story in perspective with so many different environments raging from the frozen north to the hot deserts in the South. The maps in the hardcover also help picture this mythical place and often turned back to look at it as the characters moved on. The characters are also well done and my favorites were Alivar, Thaddeus, Darrel, and Val. The villains are also unique and the Mein appear as civilized barbarians, intent on vengeance agains the Acacians and set right a wrong done agaisnt their ancestors. Their are also affairs and plot twists that make the story very thrilling. My only real complaint is that this book could easily have been stretched out to two, maybe even three books. The first part of the book was great and set the stage well, but then it jumps forward to their exile when their all grown up with little development of their characters as the children struggle to survive and adapt to their new lives. Flashbacks helps define them, but honestly would have liked to get to know each of the characters better; especially Alivar. I also thought Alivar's transformation from reluctant hero to savior was not really developed at all and would have liked to have seen him be very reclusive at first when Thatteus comes for him, then after seeing the Sanoth chooses to fulfill his destiny. There was no inner struggle from him and he just walked through the motions like what was expected of him. Of all the children, Darrel's story was the least told and thought his should have been expanded and not his sister Mena. The book is also not a quick read, and is so dense to read because of all the detail. This is certainly a story would recommend and once u start, u will be immersed in the world of Acacia.

• Good book

  Great book good read would have been 5star if i hadnt read 'a song of ice and fire' before it. Otherwise a good read and I will def read the next Acacia book

購入リンク