The Great Book of Amber--a Review with No Spoilers

The Great Book of Amber by Roger Zelazny

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Wow, it has taken me a long time to read the whole thing but that's because I've stopped and started, reading a few books at the time over the years. I enjoyed the books very much overall. The messages of family and friendship were surprising given the way everything started out, but I liked that aspect a lot. Amber and Shadow were very interesting and I love the strange places one can end up by walking through shadow. And once the Courts of Chaos get into the mix, anything can happen and often does. Sometimes I felt like the author lost his grip on his creation and it ran away from him, but sometimes those were the best parts. I love the way that situations you thought were explained in the early books turn out to be much more complicated later on. The only thing that I didn't really like was the treatment of women. As is too often the case in fantasy novels, the women are there to seduce, be seduced, be killed, be motherly, or be treacherous. They have little dialogue in most of the books and many are silhouettes at best. There is a lot of lust at first sight and only one real depiction of love. On the flip side you get a lot of interesting male characters, my favourite of course being Corwin (I always love tricksters). Even some inanimate objects seem to have personalities. I really liked the sudden, unexpected touches of humour and wit, some of which had me laughing so loudly that my family asked what was going on. I found the last book disappointing as it promised to tie up a lot of loose endings but instead left most of them dangling. Perhaps there was originally going to be another book? I don't know. Anyway, if you like fantasy at all, you really should give this series a shot, especially if you have a sense of humour.



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