Tuesday, November 5, 2013

2013 read #138: Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott.

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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