This was a positively dreadful book which had a good idea but a poor delivery. I understand that it has a tremendous following, but I can only suppose there must be hordes of readers out there who enjoy pointless verbosity.The idea behind the story is time honored in fantasy: Guys from present find their way through a portal to another time/place/age/reality -- in this case something akin to Celtic Highlands, though the development of the Celtic angle was thinner than a razor. Once in the new land, both friends find themselves separated and eventually growing apart as they take opposite sides in a civil struggle. The problem is, the character development and plot development of the book are practically stillborn. Like an emu they never get off the ground.Most annoying in the book is the author's opinion that readers have to be told the same thing at least a dozen times in different ways before they can understand it. He loves adverbs to the point of lunacy and bludgeons the reader with diatribes that eat up pages of the book without delivering anything in the way of progress. His characters are single dimensional and are constantly experiencing inexplicable mood changes, attitude adjustments and character shifts which do nothing but confuse the reader. Scenery is described in such detail that it becomes monotonous. When writing, even triads used in explanation become boring after awhile. This author sees nothing wrong with describing the same item with even 10 or 12 different descriptions, all of which say the same thing. It's as though he's giving us a V8 smack upside the head again and again because we are too stupid to get it the first time.I will certainly not be reading the second and third books because at this point I couldn't care less if Lewis/Llews and Simon/Siawn ever kiss and make up or become mortal enemies. Despite the constant drumming over the head of needless description, Albion is boring and lifeless. Insist all you want that it is brighter and richer and fuller and more amazing and more wonderful and glowing and more brilliant than our present world --- it is boring and nothing even remotely interesting happens in the book from first to last.At best The Paradise War is a cardboard cutout world with paper doll characters which completely misses with any enthusiasm for the Celtic background or anything else. As I conclude the book I can't think of a single memorable quote or any other thing learned which I would want to share. A complete waste of time. Fortunately, I downloaded it for free from Kindle so I'm not out anything but the time spent trudging through it.
I’m not sure what I was expecting as the first book in another series by this author, but after having read his Hood series, this one is lacking in the same eloquence. The main character is, for all intents and purposes, a complete idiot. He just doesn’t pick up on things or know how to react in order to ‘play along’ in a new society which he supposedly researched extensively before going to the Otherworld. Halfway through the book I noticed a lot of parallels between stories I’ve read from Celtic mythology. Like his Hood series, the author seems to take a lot of information from Welsh mythology specifically. Adding in place names and personal names in the language was cool, if hard to pronounce sometimes.The idea itself was cool, and something I haven’t read before, but the writing style did not work as well as the author had intended. It’s not as well written as his Hood series, but that’s okay since this was written back in 1991.It was also bizarre how the story at first was simply getting to the Otherworld and then the main focus of the novel shifts to the main character becoming a warrior and battling not just the forces of evil, but demons and a god. It’s as if Lewis/Llew completely forgets and doesn’t care about where he really came from though. Most stories that start out like this are ‘want to go home’ stories. This took that and then went in a completely different direction which kind of threw me off. And adding in demons and a god as the enemy was...interesting. It wasn’t what I had hoped for, but neither was it bad. It was simply different and that made it interesting. I’m not sure if I’ll read the rest of the trilogy, but this was an interesting take on Celtic mythology.Rating: 3/5
What do You think about The Paradise War (2006)?
Zzz. Boring! This is only book one of a trilogy, so I guess this book has some excuse for having a LOT of tedious back story, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. It seemed like the entire first 60% of The Paradise War was blah, blah, blah back story. And then. AND THEN. We get to the so-called "good stuff," and still NOTHING HAPPENS.The main character whines some more, his obnoxious and arrogant sidekick goes on and does some more obnoxious and arrogant things. There's a kiss. And then... the book is over.Being the first book of a trilogy, it ends with a cliffhanger, of course but I won't be going forward to the second book because I simply will not reward an author for giving me literary blue balls. Jerk.
—Emma
This story is based heavily on celtic mythology. The main character knows almost nothing about the celts and has to have everything explained to him. He is a grad student. His major is celtic studies. How does that even make sense!? I didn't end up finishing the book, got about halfway through and skimmed the rest. In the hands of a better writer the story might have been decent. The characters however were too weak and lacking in personality to carry the plot. As it is, if I could have given it zero stars I would have.
—Jenn
This was a pretty bad book! I thought the premise was intriguing but once the story really gets started it turns into a series of unrelated events that were obviously put together in chunks in hopes of a linear progression...as if Lawhead pulled each event from a "spare parts box". I listened to the audio version and on several occasions there were lines and phrases that, though I couldn't quite pin down where they were from, struck me as pulled from other stories, poems or the like. Lawhead's knowledge of Celtic mythology was admirable but the addition of the Christian elements really took away from that. He needed to either write a Christian novel or a high fantasy novel. The mixture of the two ruined my reading of it...the Lord Nudd/Demon horde bit was just too much Satan/Fallen Angels for me. I will NOT be picking up the second book...too much of the first book had a Biblical allegory ring to it.
—Dano Winsky
