The Forgotten Beasts of Eld
By: Patricia A. McKillip / Narrated By: Dina Pearlman
Length: 6 hrs and 24 mins
Well, not exactly Epic, but I enjoyed it
And amazingly enough, I didn’t enjoy it only cuz o’ the Beasts, tho’ I was indeed delighted that several of the beasts were characters in their own right.
Sybel is a total loner, happy for it to be just her and the beasts she’s summoned through wizardry but who stay with her through friendship and loyalty born of long years in each other’s company. Enter Coren with an infant. That Coren thrusts the infant on Sybel, saying she’s the baby’s only hope for life, that he’ll be killed otherwise, is bad enough. But Coren has the audacity to tell her that she’d better learn some womanly things posthaste, that she doesn’t appear to have a nurturing bone in her body.
She does NOT disagree, even as she bemusedly takes the infant in.
And she has to go through a whole weird thing whereby, as the boy grows, she wonders what all these odd things she’s been feeling actually mean. Turns out: She loves the danged kid!
And so it goes in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. It’s a story of kingdoms and kings mistrustful of each other; of evil wizard; of Sybel being dragged into it all to the point where she chooses to let the boy go, to the point where she chooses to kill the boy’s father.
There is romance, there is war. There are lies galore. And through it all, Sybel is a delightful character who has the cold-blooded heart of wizard out for revenge, but one who loves deeply enough that she wishes to spare those in her circle the darkness of her soul, the foulness of her actions.
Though this is categorized as an Epic Fantasy, it’s somewhat tooooo short for that, and it’s paced soooooo quickly that we move from situation to situation posthaste, all the while getting satisfying conclusions along the way, no threads left dangling as we go along, no stories that need winding up as we move onto new happenings.
Dina Pearlman does a good job with the variety of characters, be they evil, be they good. And she marvelously captures voices of Beasts, making them seem quite foreign and otherworldly indeed.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I LOVED the ending cuz Beasts Rock. But mostly, I liked how Sybel didn’t try to be anything but what she was, world and people be damned. With her and one other strong mother-type thrown in, and we’ve got a good book with strong women leads in it! And tho’ Coren starts off as a pig? Well, he grew on me too! This is a short book that seems even shorter, and I liked it.
Still, I’m in the mood for EPIC, so onto new audiobooks!
Brandon Sanderson, anyone?!?
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