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A review by duffypratt
Rise of a Merchant Prince by Raymond E. Feist
3.0
An enjoyable mess of a book.
It follows Roo, who is Erik's best friend, and who was part of the "Dirty Dozen" team in the first book. His main goal in life is to become a filthy rich merchant, and this book details how he goes about that. This story, for what it is, I liked very much. Roo is not a simple character, and he's a bit of a jerk.
Because of the limitations in scope of this story, there is very little in the way of high fantasy. If you pulled this story out of its setting, it could just as easily have been told in a novel by Dickens or Trollope. Roo has trouble with the local guilds. He uses his wiles, and his less than perfect ethics, to launch his career. He gets involved and marries a girl he doesn't love to advance his ambitions. Hell, there's even a long section in the book on the intricacies of the grain futures market, where Roo and his fledgling syndicate set about cornering the market on grain, based on their inside information that the upcoming crop is plagued by locusts.
I know all of this sounds dull, and not the stuff of fantasy. But it makes for a good story anyway, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Here's the problem. This is the second part of "The Serpentwar Saga", so Feist feels honor bound to advance the overall plot. The way he does this is only tangentially related to the main arc of the book. And Feist does a really poor job of integrating the two. Moreover, the main story really isn't all that interesting. Eric and Calis and Nakor go off again to the other continent to break some eggs (literally). They are the eggs of the Pantathians, and that's what it has to do with advancing the story. Then make another "shocking" discovery on their mission. And they get into a bunch of trouble and are, of course, rescued. All with an obligatory poignant and surprising death.
The pieces fit together in the way that a jigsaw puzzle does when you start forcing stuff that doesn't belong, or when you start cutting up your pieces to fit. It doesn't make for a good overall book. But the book that I think wanted to write, the one of the title, I enjoyed quite a bit. He just didn't fit it that well into his overall saga.
At least this time there was no Pug ex Machina, so that's a plus. I will get around to the third book at some point, but I'm no longer in a rush.
It follows Roo, who is Erik's best friend, and who was part of the "Dirty Dozen" team in the first book. His main goal in life is to become a filthy rich merchant, and this book details how he goes about that. This story, for what it is, I liked very much. Roo is not a simple character, and he's a bit of a jerk.
Because of the limitations in scope of this story, there is very little in the way of high fantasy. If you pulled this story out of its setting, it could just as easily have been told in a novel by Dickens or Trollope. Roo has trouble with the local guilds. He uses his wiles, and his less than perfect ethics, to launch his career. He gets involved and marries a girl he doesn't love to advance his ambitions. Hell, there's even a long section in the book on the intricacies of the grain futures market, where Roo and his fledgling syndicate set about cornering the market on grain, based on their inside information that the upcoming crop is plagued by locusts.
I know all of this sounds dull, and not the stuff of fantasy. But it makes for a good story anyway, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Here's the problem. This is the second part of "The Serpentwar Saga", so Feist feels honor bound to advance the overall plot. The way he does this is only tangentially related to the main arc of the book. And Feist does a really poor job of integrating the two. Moreover, the main story really isn't all that interesting. Eric and Calis and Nakor go off again to the other continent to break some eggs (literally). They are the eggs of the Pantathians, and that's what it has to do with advancing the story. Then make another "shocking" discovery on their mission. And they get into a bunch of trouble and are, of course, rescued. All with an obligatory poignant and surprising death.
The pieces fit together in the way that a jigsaw puzzle does when you start forcing stuff that doesn't belong, or when you start cutting up your pieces to fit. It doesn't make for a good overall book. But the book that I think wanted to write, the one of the title, I enjoyed quite a bit. He just didn't fit it that well into his overall saga.
At least this time there was no Pug ex Machina, so that's a plus. I will get around to the third book at some point, but I'm no longer in a rush.