This is one of those books that's fun to read, but has little else going for it. If you're a hardcore fantasy fan looking to kill some time, you could do worse, but in general I would not recommend.Lion of Senet is an unusual epic fantasy in that not only is it decidedly not a Tolkien knock-off--no orcs or elves in sight--but there's no magic, no drawn-out journeys and no epic battles. Instead, the plot is driven by political manuevering (perhaps better termed "interpersonal manipulation"), and the primary conflict is between science and religion. Although it feels like fantasy, the book has been termed science fiction due to the setting, a world with two suns. Consequently, it's never truly dark, except when one sun eclipses the other: a phenomenon that provides the basis for the villainous sham religion. (Oddly, given that the book prizes science and math, this orbit makes no sense; one could argue that that's the real fantasy element.)In other ways, it's a fairly traditional tale of a unusually talented teenage boy, raised in obscurity, who's secretly the heir to a kingdom and spends the story making friends and learning about his mysterious parentage and about how to play politics. You've all read that before, but the plot is actually the best thing about the book. It's well-paced, moving briskly from one character to the next, and kept me turning pages--in fact, I read more than half of the book in one day. The problem is that it depends heavily on melodrama: people overhearing things they shouldn't, often when someone is bluntly explaining something that either shouldn't need be said or realistically wouldn't be, people being easily manipulated, people having simplistic emotional responses to events, and so on.As for the characters, there's just not much there. The book fails at the crucial task of making them seem like real, believable human beings, rather than simply words on a page. The women are particularly bad, being almost uniformly one-dimensional (the possible exception is Alenor, who joins the men in two-dimensionality--still not good). While the author avoids the most common reasons for flat female characters--they aren't defined as sex objects or by relationships with men--the book isn't free of unfortunate tropes, either. There are three types of women here: the virgins, who are good (if often annoying, prone to yelling at people who are saving their lives and so on); the mothers, who are embarrassingly useless and unable to control their emotions, even when they're queens; and the whores, who are all diagnosable psychopaths running the scam religion.Even aside from the problematic implications, though, the characters simply lack substance. It's the sort of book where you can pinpoint the main villain the moment she appears because all she ever thinks about is how she wants power over everyone and doesn't care who she kills in the process. Subtle, that.The writing isn't much good either, although I've certainly seen worse. It has a tendency to be repetitive, overuse adverbs, and state the obvious (repeatedly). And there are the jarringly modern idioms in the dialogue: "be like that," "just a tad," "what's your problem?" and the like. Some of the exposition is clumsy as well, with the main character impossibly ignorant of basic facts about his own world. As for the world itself, it's passable, but we never learn much about the place except that it's a garden-variety quasi-medieval type and has an abundance of natural disasters.In the end, this was a somewhat amusing book, but a fairly poorly-written one that I would not recommend. I was entertained enough to finish, but although there's little resolution, I'm unlikely to pick up the sequel.
(Re-posted from http://theturnedbrain.blogspot.com)It pleases me to see that Australian author Jennifer Fallon is slowly starting to receive some well deserved international attention. Her recent ‘Tide Lords’ quartet garnered a couple of positive reviews, and I’ve seen some blogs posting about her latest series ‘The Undivided.’But I want to talk now about one of her older, less known, set of books; The Second Sons trilogy, comprising of 'The Lion of Senet,' 'Eye of the Labyrinth,' and 'Lord of the Shadows.' It’s a shame that these books haven’t received a lot more attention, because they’re really pretty great.The title "Second Sons" is a clever little play on words. The trilogy concerns it self with the second sons of two powerful families, but the plot also hinges on the second sun in the world's sky. Ranadon has two suns you see, a large one which sets like ours, and a second one which never sets. Except for this one time when it did. A generation or so ago the second sun set, ushering in a disastrous dark age. And here’s where things get interesting. A super genius dude was able to predict when the dark age would end (with the power of maths!), and he told his priestess friend. She uses this information to convince the big ruler dude, aka The Lion of Senet, to sacrifice his son to end the dark age, and because she knows the time it will end it appears the goddess was talking through her.But (the plot thickens) the super genius dude didn’t just predict when the dark age would end, he predicted when the next one would start. And priestess girl, who’s now insanely powerful high priestess lady, kind of needs that info to maintain her credibility. (It would be bad for her health if the ruler found out he sacrificed his first born for nothing…) Too bad super genius guy hasn’t been seen in decades.But! There is another young lad with the brainpower to figure it out. This is Dirk, one of the "second sons" in the title. He and the Lion of Senet's son Kirsh are the main tagonists of the books. Not a typo. Tagonsts. It's a word I just made up. They're not protagonists (good guys), they're not antagonists (bad guys), they're just people. They do good things, they do shitty things, and believe me when I say they'll break your heart. This true for most of the characters in the trilogy. There is no black and white here, trust me. The Lion of Senet, in particular, is very well done. It would have been easy to make him a straight up villain, what with him killing his own son and all. But Fallon makes him a far more complex character than that. He’s fanatical in his his religious views, and a lot of the plot is driven by this. But what choice does the guy have? To admit that his religion might not be all-knowing would be to admit that he sacrificed his son for nothing. It makes for compelling reading let me tell you.And the ending. Ah, the ending. It’s one of those ends that hits you like a punch to the gut, that stays with you for months or years or hell, probably the rest of your life. Years later and I find myself thinking of these books at odd times, running over in my mind the course of events that made things in the final volume play out the way they did. There is nothing so impressive as a book drawing to a perfect and inevitable close, with all the small pieces set in place over the three books leading to one magnificent finale.They're not perfect, I'll admit that. These were written early in Fallon's career when she was still smoothing out her prose a little. She gets a bit heavy with the adverbs (he said sadly, she yelled angrily, he sighed ecstatically, and so on) but it's certainty not enough to ruin the enjoyment of the story.
What do You think about Lion Of Senet (2015)?
The Second Sons Trilogy is a story centralised on Dirk Provin, the second son of a regional lord, and cousin to heirs of two ruling families. Set on Ranadon, the series is set after the Age of Shadows, a time when the second sun (incidentally, a clever double meaning to the book's title) disappeared from Ranadon and created widespread famine and disarray. The end of this event was uncovered using mathematical knowledge of the orbit of suns, discovered by Neris Veran, a genius-level researcher who worked with Belagren, the self-styled High Priestess of the Shadowdancers. She subsequently stole this information, proclaimed it as divinely inspired visions, declared herself as High Priestess, and used it to dupe the Lion of Senet, Antonov Latanya, into offering his infant son for sacrifice to bring back the second sun. After this event, Neris disappeared, and Belagren's power grab becomes desperate as she realises that her inability to read the symbols and writing could cost her her place as High Priestess. She needs someone who can puzzle it out for her to maintain her power. Once Dirk's towering intelligence comes to light, he becomes a pawn in these power games, but he has an end game of his own...At first when I picked up this book (and it may have been that my opinion was somewhat swayed by other reviews) I found it slow to start - slower, it seems, than either the Wolfblade or Demon Child series, which are, in my humble opinion, Jennifer Fallon's crowning glories. Having said that, the minds-eye visuality in Fallon's books grabs you immediately. But when the story really took off, after all the scene-setting, it honestly felt like a *bang* in my head. The 'light bulb' moment when you, as the reader, are almost... permitted... to view the end game, while still watching how the characters reach it. Suddenly I saw all the parts come together, and I started to second-guess at the parts that weren't quite making sense yet. But that is the brilliance of Fallon's novels: she leaves out just enough info to keep you hungering for more, while giving your mind a work out to discover the political and social machinations permeating her books.I enjoyed the characters, although I felt that, the connections between them were a little too instant or unexplainable in some ways. There was some duality in the traits of the characters, where they acted one way because of their values, then acted totally another way because it helped the plot. I found Tia's consistent hatred to be wearing on me after a while, but I guess that it was also true to how the character would have felt. Maybe it just pushed buttons. The only other criticism I have is that when I started reading, the names felt 'clunky' in my mind at times.The series itself is definitely up to Jennifer Fallon's standards, and her flair for understanding the minds of villains and their twisted psyches is ever-present in these books. Would I read it again? Probably, if only for the opportunity to read the story with knowledge of what every twist and turn was leading to :)
—Bridgett McDonald
This trilogy was pretty good without being exceptional. I thought the Wolfblade trilogy solidly better. Though it'd be high 4.x stars, and this is either high 3.x or very low 4.x stars. Jennifer Fallon is a solid author regardless. I at least somewhat like about everything I've read by her.This series basically has no magic, similar to the Wolfblade trilogy. It's only really fantasy because of the basic setting of the world and the tone of the books. I don't mind that, but some of you might not prefer it.Probably not ever worth a reread, but just good enough for me to recommend it to someone to read it once. Though of course that depends on how much time you spend reading, and if you're running out of things to read. :)
—Aaron Anderson
I’m absolutely over the moon with this book. It’s absolutely fantastic—the kind of fantasy I adore, well-written, engaging storyline, emotionally arresting, wonderful characters, on and on and on. I’m completely impressed with Jennifer Fallon and the world she’s introduced readers to in Lion of Senet. Absolutely amazing.Lion of Senet is not epic fantasy with battles and wizards and dragons. The story is instead focused on court intrigue, politics, schemes, conspiracies, and religion. I love books like that. Political-based fantasy is seriously my favorite thing ever. The plot had so many twists, and there was a lot of nuances and different agendas moving around. There were no battles or action sequences, but Lion of Senet is phenomenal in hooking readers and keeping them intellectually and emotionally invested in the story.Fallon’s characters, also, played a big part in this. I’m somewhat tentative on how the female protagonists were presented, but I think the author has laid the groundwork here for them to develop into strong, well-rounded women. On the other hand, Lion of Senet’s “main” protagonist, Dirk Provin, is perfection. He’s a mathematical genius and political mastermind—all at the age of fifteen. He cunningly works within a hostile country, but is still vulnerable and childlike beneath his formidable exterior. Sometimes you have to shake your head at him, but ultimately Dirk is the kind of protagonist whose story you want to follow, and who you want to win in the end. Likewise, the other characters all play an important role, and I think what Jennifer Fallon has done here is to make each person human, with their own private ambitions that don’t usually match up. Multiple perspectives help here, as readers are exposed to several characters’ mindsets and motivations, so that, even if full sympathy is not possible, understanding certainly is.Layered underneath the A-plus plot and characterization, Fallon presents a multi-faceted world. Ranadon (the fictional planet) has two suns, one orbiting the other, and sometimes one sun will eclipse the other. The High Priestess has manipulated this scientific concept to rise in power, and currently everyone runs around in terror that they’ll upset the Goddess and the suns will go away again. Of course, some people know the truth about the suns, yadda yadda, que tension and lots of scheming and politicking on the part of everyone. Good stuff, good stuff.All of this equals a promising beginning to a series. The foundation is laid, the players are in position. Fallon has established her ability to write a compelling story and to create characters with depth. Lion of Senet is a strong, strong novel, and I loved every minute of reading it.Reviews & more at Respiring Thoughts
—Renae
