Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott
718 pages
Published 2006
Read from October 28 to November 5
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
A
pretty good boilerplate fantasy novel. The characters, prose, and plot
outline didn't feel like anything particularly new or noteworthy, but
the setting was wonderful, a worldbuilding nerd's fondest dream, mixing
Chinese, Central Asian, Republican Roman, Japanese, and other influences
into a vivid, colorful, engaging milieu. I totally dig fantasy versions
of Central Asia, in part because Central Asia as a whole is, in concept
anyway, one of my favorite regions of the globe. So that aspect of the
book was awesome and just what I was looking for. Plus, between this and
some short stories I'm reading, I'm starting to develop a fondness for
fantasy versions of ghost folklore. As for everything else here, as I
mentioned, the story and characters were mediocre to adequate; every
male character becomes incapacitated at the sight of curves and topless
women, perking them right up and leaving them tongue tied even during
desperate survival situations, which got really silly after a while.
One
incidental OCD note: I dislike reading volumes of a series in different
formats. The next two books in Elliott's Crossroads Trilogy I have in
hardcover, and they're each about 250 and 150 pages shorter than this
mass market paperback. The pagecount for this book is obviously inflated
by format; because it's a series and I'm keeping track of these things,
this bugs me a tiny bit.
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