Talyn

I finally managed to get a copy of Holly Lisle's Talyn. This book is devilishly hard to get! I imagine that's very good news for Holly. I'm very anxious to read it. As those who have been following this blog will recall, Holly feels this is her best work yet, and manages to get both well-developed characters and a well-developed plot in the same story (some of her earlier books excelled in one or the other, but not both, in my opinion). I don't know anything about the story, really, other than the fact that it is fantasy. That's okay with me, though. I don't generally get into fantasy, so I don't want to bias my reading of it. Not that I have anything against fantasy, it's just too many of them rely on the plot device of the Foolish Villain who puts all his power into a single artifact (which he then loses), or the Quest for the Item of Something or Another that must be found to save the world as we know it. About the only original fantasy storyline I've seen is Anne McCaffery's Dragonriders of Pern series. But I've got high hopes for this book. I've got a lot of respect for Holly as a writer, so I don't really think she'll let me down. On the other hand, as I commented to my son the other day, the one disadvantage of being a writer is that you can no longer read books just to read them -- you're always trying to figure out how they pulled off a particular effect! :)