Mercedes Lackey and First-Book Syndrome

Arrows of the Queen, Mercedes Lackey

It has been far, FAR too long since I read a fantasy book.  I suspect book clubs are getting in the way. Not many books selected by my fellow book clubees are fantasy books. And by “not many” I mean “zero”.

Arrows of the Queen has  a real origins-story feel to it, which makes sense because not only is it the first book in a trilogy but the trilogy itself is also the first of several serialized trilogies all set in the same world. Laying the foundation for this multitude of books demands a lot of world-building in fairly short order, and this, the first book, ultimately ends up feeling just a bit rushed.

Arrows also feels like a first book, which once again makes sense because it is, in fact, Lackey’s first book. I don’t mean that it’s bad. In fact, it has some strong writing and thoughtful details about how this fantasy world has been imagined. What I mean by a first-book feel is that it seems like the author is still feeling her way around how best to write her story, sometimes spending too much time on a less interesting subject and often not spending enough time on a compelling one. It’s also short – just 300 or so pages – and I can imagine that if Lackey returned to rewrite it, she’d land closer to 500. All this just means Arrows is “cute” and “fun”, rather than potentially “breathtaking” and “illustrious”.

I feel like I should disclose that my favourite (and by that I mean !!FAVOURITE!!) fantasy author is Guy Gavriel Kay. I can’t adequately articulate how much I love his books, his writing, his characters. And it’s against this, the Kay-Scale, that I measure all other fantasy novels, so anything I say about Arrows should be taken with a big ol’ grain of salt.

Honestly, I thought this book had lots of potential, and is definitely on its way to becoming a great trilogy. I look forward to reading the rest of it.

Rating: I elect to withhold my buy/borrow rating until I’ve read the entire series. I think Mercedes Lackey can easily go from a 2 on the Kay-Scale to a 6 (and to be fair, the Summer Tree, Kay’s first book, was itself only about a 5 or 6, suffering from much of that same first-book syndrome. The rest of Kay’s books are all 10s. Well, okay, there might be one 9. And I dare you to find it).