Rating: 
Summary: Extremely well-plotted, but lacking in depth and wit
Review: By no means the best fantasy novel I've ever read, this first installment of a proposed trilogy features an innovative plot, with surprising twists and unexpected encounters in just about every chapter. That is the book's strength: Drake has quite an imagination, and he kept me guessing throughout. Although I found the main characters likable, the heroes are, sadly, from the same mold you find in too many fantasy adventures these days--well-honed bodies, invincible powers, preordained destinies--and they are notable for a lack of introspection (except in their ability to compare the outside world constantly to the way things were back in their rural village). Even worse is the sprite Mellie, Drake's attempt at creating a cute little Disney-style sidekick a la Thumper or Flounder; instead he conjures an annoying creature that is as appealing as Jar Jar. (A very typical line: " 'You're so strong, Cashel!' Mellie cooed as she cuddled his ear.") Drake is much better when developing the characters of misguided protagonists (like the jealous Ilna) and irredeemable wrongdoers--particularly the magician Meder, whose heinousness completely stunned even a jaded fantasy reader like me. Drake's writing style throughout the book never rises above utilitarian. He excels at describing the adventures of his characters in a journalistic tone that is always clear and usually concise, carrying the reader along in page-turning anticipation from one episode to the next. What his prose boasts in clarity, however, it lacks in lyricism and wit. There is nary a well-turned phrase, and the lack of comic moments is remarkable for a writer with such an incredible imagination. If Drake were able to inject more humor into his prose and add depth to his heroes, he could produce a fantasy masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Truly awful.
Review: Can I first say the most important thing: Please, please dont buy this book. If you have any experience of fantasy - youll hate it. If you dont - youll be put off fantasy forever. Which is a tragedy because most fantasy is actually very good.
I have read about 60-70 fantasy novels.. and this (and the second book) I can honestly say is the only book I have not enjoyed.
It starts well, if perhaps the events arent quite believable. However, as the story progresses.. and you could argue it doesnt progress.. in fact you could argue there is no story as such.. anyway, through the course of the book events happen which are major no-no's in fantasy.
David Drake quite obviously has no concept of believable fantasy writing. Whilst Robert Jordan has characters which can travel great distances through portals, and Robin Hobb has magical standing stones which allow skill-users to travel between stones, David Drake see's no reason to provide any form of justification for his characters to suddenly move from one place to another.
David Drake can write scenes well, and his characters are believable - but he just cant thread together a plot. These books just consist of a series of completely disjointed scenes which bear no relation to each other or the overall story (whatever that is) and quite conveniently all the main characters get transported/teleported/whatever (who cares? - David Drake doesn't) to the same place at the end to defeat a bad guy who im not sure was doing anything bad anyway.
In fact I havent a clue what this book was about.
Can I instead recommend to readers anything by Robin Hobb. Shes my personal favourite writer around - the liveship series is particularily good. Please dont waste time on this garbage.
Rating: 
Summary: It truly is one of the best fantasies of the decade.
Review: I have tried several times to read this book. I even bought it on tape to listen to on the way to work. It is long and if your a fan of fantasy, you've seen it all before. The tapes were especially annoying. I didn't realize until tape three that you had to reajust the speakers to listen to that tape again. It was frustratuing, and the action was confusing. Sorry, I gave it my best. Try David Drakes "Dragon Lord" instead.
Rating:
Summary: Good ideas dragged down
Review: I read this book when I was bored at work. While it served to fill the time, a bunch of good ideas somehow just don't gel together well in the final story. The magic system is really interesting, it has a good setting (being on a bunch of islands), and a good backstory setup. Then why do I rate it just average? Well, the main drawback for me was the characters. There's two classes of characterization here: slim and none. All of them seem one dimentional at best, and some of the characters that get the most page time fall into the 'none' catigory. Hundreds of pages were devoted to these characters, and not once did the author ever show what was going on inside their heads. Also, this book has by far the highest body count of any fantasy book I've read. It seems that characters are introduced, and then offed a few chapters later. One of the characters starts the story taking off on a sea voyage with about 400 sailors and various others, and she's the only one alive by the end of the book. And almost every single bit character introduced outside the main ones are really, well, vile. Loathsome and disgusting people, really. I'll agree with others who have said that there's a lot of unconnected adventures in it. While adventures aren't bad in and of themselves, it seems like in this case they were stuck in merely to lengthen the book with no purpose or character development going on. Still, most of the adventures are exciting. It's not horribly bad, nor is it famously good. It's just... average.
Rating: 
Summary: Where are we going and how do we know when we get there?
Review: I started reading reviews of this book to give me some insight into Drake's world and where the story is heading, assuming *I* was missing something. Clearly, it wasn't just me.
I don't know, maybe Drake was thinking about old school fantastic stories like Gulliver's Travels and Arabian Tales where surprising things just happen to the main characters and they muddle through each adventure and stumble on to the next. I understand he's got a 4th book out now. Maybe he's managed to put a plot together by then? Sadly, I may never know because I can't seem to force myself through the second book! But this is a review of THIS book. I enjoyed it well enough. It's a good time killer and moves along fairly well. If you just keep reading and don't stop to think about it, it's quite enjoyable. If you like Drake's other books, you're heading to the beach for the weekend and have nothing else to read, you don't feel like getting emotionally involved with new characters in a new world, AND you can still order a used copy, then this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Loved This Book!
Review: I'm not gonna go into a lot of exposition here on why this is a great book, just take a chance and judge for yourself. Even if you wouldn't list it as one of your top favorite fantasies ever, you'll still have a good time with it. In the end, that's how I judge a book to be worth reading or not: Does it COMPEL you to keep turning the pages? Are you driven to keep coming back to it whenever you're able to do so? If it's part of a series, as this one is, will you buy the next one in the series? If you answer yes to all these questions, then it's a book worth reading. This book is, based on my answering yes to all these questions, a book worth reading.
All I will say to those who claim it's so bad is that it's ridiculous to criticize a book or author for not keeping with genre "conventions" because, let's face it, conventions make for a lot of monotony after a while. Unlike a couple of people here who hated the book and said they've read 50-70 fantasy novels in their time, it's probably not exaggerating to say I've read several hundred over the last couple of decades, so I'm very familiar with Fantasy's staples, and I can tell you unreservedly that this book unequivocably qualifies as a Fantasy, to Hell with whatever else anyone else is trying to compare it to for it to be considered "in" in their opinion. And some of the people who criticize Drake for not knowing or not using these conventions also accuse him of heavily borrowing from other, supposedly better writers. If this is the case, if he's lifted so many ideas from other writers, then how is it possible that those writers' conventions would at the same time be missing from this book? Just curious.
In parting, just let me say that I read this right after having read several of Goodkind's Sword of Truth books - and it was a refreshing change! To those who said that Drake's character's aren't very fleshed out, let me tell you that his writing seemed very "mature" to me after finishing Goodkind's books, which are full of characters Goodkind keeps reminding us are hardened, stoic, even noble types, and yet they spend almost all their time either crying or getting angry or jealous and then apologizing for it, and probably at least two-thirds of their conversations are artificial, unnatural sounding expositions that serve no purpose but to remind the reader of what's come before, and to remind readers that all the rest of the characters in the book either love or hate or hate-to-love Richard because he's so wonderfully kind-hearted and sincere, that incorrugible but oh so good-hearted boy. Whoever accused Drake of ripping off Jordan - hello! please tell me that you don't think he's any more guilty of that than Goodkind; and yet you probably loved Goodkind's books, right? (I can honestly say, though, that Jordan never came to mind when I was reading Drake's book - though he DID when I was reading Goodkind, and often.)
That's all.
Rating:
Summary: Deus Ex Machina Brutally Contrived
Review: In "Lord of the Isles" David Drake brings us the kickoff for a fantasy series from an author who is so obviously unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre that it is sometimes painful to read. It is not so much that he flouts convention, or that he tries to redefine the genre. Rather, that he seems blissfully, but painfully, unaware that there ARE conventions to be drawn from. Such things as character development, self-determination, and character growth - ideas so ingrained in good heroic fantasy - simply take a back seat to the remorseless progress of the tale being told. Events happen for no more reason than some distant nameless faceless deity decided that they should, and destiny is reduced to a predefined set of required actions.
At the same time, elements of the book seem to borrow shamelessly from other, better fantasy novels. Fans of Robert Jordan (for instance) will recognize familiar characters, plotlines, and plot devices that seem obviously lifted from the Wheel of Time series. Fans of the immortal Tolkien will easily recognize the stark good vs. evil subtext and the black and white character portrayals.
Character development suffers. Drake drives his story along with a heavy-handed Deus Ex Machina. The characters are pushed through the book from one place to another with little or no sense of self-determination and no decision points where their own desires or will influences their destinies. Often this is a result of random occurrences ... shipwrecks, kidnappings, chance meetings, and even accidental interplanar travel. Yet still the characters all "happen" to end up in the right place and right time for their end-of-the-book reunion some weeks later in a relatively obscure city many hundreds of miles from where they started.
As is explained (rather unclearly) in chapter one of this book the gods rule all and the people are only pawns. What then follows is six hundred and twenty-five pages of curious boredom, as you watch the central characters (the pawns) get pushed about the board by unseen hands.
The pawns themselves have little or no choice in the matter. Almost without fail their situations are presented to them as "do-what-the-narrator-wants-or-die" scenarios. If you are looking for moral ambiguity or for difficult choices defining a character's destinies, then continue looking - there is none of that here.
Finally, (and most inexcusable) the various subplots intertwine mercilessly, with every chapter (often as little as three pages) bringing yet another cut-away to a different character's storyline. At one point this became so tiresome that this reader found it necessary to re-read the central part of the book, reading first one storyline and then the next until the bulk of the characters came back together again.
And come together they do. The last forty pages of the book pretty much involve all of the characters bumping into one another and regrouping in a mind-numbing series of coincidences.
This is all too much, yet simply not nearly enough. I recommend the reader stay away, and I recommend that Mr. Drake go back to writing military sci-fi - where character development is so much less important to the story. Thanks.
Rating:
Summary: It truly is one of the best fantasies of the decade.
Review: Lord of the Isles is an engrossing book that you will not be able to put down until you read it from cover to cover. The Sumerian backround is an interesting twist to a genre filled with Tolkien copy cats. Buy it now!
Rating: 
Summary: This book started something for me!
Review: My experience before this book with science fiction was the Hobbit series (when it first came out)! So, now that I've dated myself, let me say that I really enjoyed this book. It was left on an airplane by someone, and I picked it up because I had a long airport layover in front of me. I was truly surprised at how engaging the characters were. I liked how the author jumped around in parallel story lines. It kept my attention, though if I let a day or so go by without reading some, I usually had to refresh my memory of what the characters were facing. Since reading this book, I've read Queen of Demons, and I am about to start Servant of The Dragon. I guess now I would be considered a fan of David Drake's writing.
Rating:
Summary: You're kidding me!!!
Review: Some books reviews call for subtlety, but in this case I think I'll cut directly to the chase. "Lord of the Isles" is one of the worst pieces of nonsensical drivel ever written. David Drake's writing is confusing, silly, and immature all at once. The book is filled with grammar errors. This was, apparently, another case of the editor being out to lunch on a major fantasy novel. There are times when it seems like he's simply throwing words together at random with zero thought. For instance, he uses the phrase "waxen darkness". How on earth is it possible for darkness to be waxen? This happens several times per page, not just once in a while. Drake's inability to keep track of what he's written is enough to drive you insane. For example, there's one scene where a character remarks that she's never even heard of a particular city before. Half a page later she starts lecturing somebody else about the history of that city. Gaping plot holes and flaws in the story's logic, choppy writing with chapters that are only two or three pages long, and random appearances of new characters and concepts without any explanation are all apparent throughout the book. Characterization is all but nonexistent. If young people living in a tiny isolated village suddenly had their lives turned upside down by strangers and were forced to undertake dangerous journeys, there are certain feelings that you'd expect them to have: surprise, fear, loneliness, homesickness, and so forth. In "Lord of the Isles", most of the characters don't experience any emotions whatsoever. They drift through the book witnessing astonishing and frightening events without even the slightest reaction. Unbelievable stupidity is about the only defining characteristic of every person. For example, when a group gets shipwrecked in territory that they now is controlled by hostile forces who want them dead, they don't make any attempt to hide or protect themselves, but instead walk right into the clutches of the bad guys. Their captor knows that one of them is a powerful wizard, but doesn't even try to stop the wizard from using magic to free them, and so forth. Drake devotes almost zero space to descriptive writing, making it nearly impossible to visualize what is happening during the action scenes that occur roughly once every five pages. The fight scenes themselves are laughable. I've complained before about how many fantasy novels have cheesy, unrealistic depictions of fighting, but this book tops them all. I lost track of how many times one of the naive farmers just picked up a weapon and beat the stuffing out of an entire mob of well-trained soldiers. "Lord of the Isles" suffers from the worst case of lack of plot continuity I've ever seen. At one point a group of characters are on a raft near an island called Tegma. The next time that we see them, the raft has suddenly moved hundreds of miles north, apparently crossing an area of dry land in the process, and there's no explanation for how it happened. I could go on listing problems, but I think that you get the point by now, so I'll conclude with a few words about Tor Fantasy, the company that published this stinker. Fifteen years ago, Tor was just one of the many companies struggling along in the fantasy field. In 1989, however, they hit pay dirt with Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series. Since then, they seem to have decided that the fastest way to money is simply to find authors whose only 'talent' is the ability to copy down the Wheel of Time while changing the names and a few minor details. Here are just a few of the similarities between "The Eye of the World" and "Lord of the Isles": Both books focus on and are told from the perspective of four people in their upper teens who live in a quaint, isolated village, but who are forced to take a journey to somewhere else and get caught up in larger events. In both books, the action begins when a well-dressed older woman arrives from out of town. In both cases, the woman turns out to be a powerful wizard, although we don't learn the true extent of her magical power until much later. In "The Eye of the world", the archvillain is 'The Dark One'. In "Lord of the Isles", it's 'The Hooded One'. In both cases, this very bad person is making a second go-round at conquering the world because his first attempt failed several thousand years ago. In both cases, the hero of the book turns out to be a resurrected version of the ancient leader who defeated the bad guy way back then. Likewise, Drake copies Jordan's inept dialogue, overwritten dream sequences, inability to create a female character who isn't bossy and arrogant, etc... I could gripe further, but what's the point? Tor will continue to support these copy artists until the audience finally wises up and stops buying their work. Until then, those of us who want originality and intelligence will just have to seek out other publishing houses.
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