Wyrdness's Reviews > The Deed of Paksenarrion

I don't understand how so many awesome things could take place in this trilogy and it still be one of the most boring, dry stories I've ever read.

If the author had taken as much time on the character interactions and emotional content as she did over lovingly detailing every muddy field and dense woodland Paks had to march, ride, stumble or otherwise traverse in some fashion, then this would have been a shining beacon of dialogue and deep insight in to the inner workings of the human mind. Sadly she didn't though, so it was full of boring or thoroughly unlikeable individuals I never much cared for (I'm looking at you every single judgemental, hypocritical Marshal of Gird. I hated the entire second book just because there's so many of these jerk-arses for "good" in it).

I've read that others consider Paksenarrion to be a strong female character, but I'd have to disagree. Being able to wield a sword and having no sexual desire what-so-ever doesn't make her strong, or even particularly interesting. Personally I found that she was virtually a blank place holder of a character for most of the series, having absolutely no wants or desires beyond being a good soldier and doing what she's told to do in order to move the plot along (then later being a good paladin and moving the plot along under the guise of doing the will of the gods). Good friends of hers die throughout the series and she learns she can never return to her family because it would make them a target for evil attentions, yet after a sentence of "then she cried" it's never spoken of again and she appears no worse than she was before. Even when truly horrific things happen to Paks I never really got a sense of her suffering, even when I was being directly told how much she hated her existence at that time. I feel this is an error in the writing and not on my part as a reader. It's not my job to decide the emotional emphasis for the scene if the author doesn't make an effort to show me what the character is feeling or going through at that precise point in the story.

When the story wasn't being boring, indulging in endlessly dragging scene descriptions, or sucking at character building, it was having weird sojourns in to D&D adventures. At the beginning of the second book it literally sounded like the author was writing up the notes on a game she'd played in. For some reason her Lawful Good warrior (Paks) decided to raid a dungeon an elven ruin with a half-elf rogue-wizard she'd just met (of dubious alignment) and along the way somehow managed to purge the surrounding land of a lingering evil. This interlude had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book or the series at all, except that the elves liked her slightly more, not that the ungrateful bastards ever really showed it or trusted her judgement at face value at any point afterwards.

I should note that the elves in this story aren't really seen much for the most part, but every time they do appear they try really hard to be inscrutable, all knowing entities who have lived hundreds of human lifetimes and so are wise, so very wise. Yet they never give a straight answer to anything and actively mess with peoples minds to cause actions (or inactions) to occur based on what they feel is best (even if they're not going to hang around afterwards), just made them seem like petty, spiteful jerks. Much like the Girdsmen in this series (who somehow manage to have a very Christian flavour despite emulating their patron saint Gird, protector of the innocent, by arming themselves to the teeth), they claim to work for the greater good and be on the side of the High Lord and the pantheon of "good" gods, but on the whole they just seem to be narrow minded individuals who only pay lipservice to the idea of goodness and dispense help only to those they consider to be "deserving".

So to conclude things here before I go off on a complete ranty tangent, no, I really didn't like this series. I know it's considered by some to be one of those great fantasy successors to Tolkien, and I guess in some ways it is (Tolkien could also linger overly long on just the wrong thing *cough*TomBombadil*cough*), but mostly I just don't see it. I want to be clear and say I didn't absolutely hate the series though. There were a lot of things that took place that I thought would have been interesting if they'd also been invested with any emotional weight at all (and there are a few scenes like that, but they stand out from the pages and pages of surrounding text because the rest is so bland), but on the whole I just found this an incredibly tedious read that I wont be rereading in the future.