Rating: 
Summary: detailed, interesting beginning of a trilogy
Review: "Past Imperative" is the first volume of a trilogy that takes place half in England during WWI, and half in the Vales, an odd geographic region of a world called Nextdoor, where magic works. Well, actually, according to Duncan, magic works in our world too, but we can't use it. A person from our world can use magic in any other world, where he or she is a "stranger," but no one can use magic in the world of his or her birth. Magical power is called mana, and is especially powerful at places called nodes, which also serve as gateways to other worlds. In our world, strangers work secretly, but in Nextdoor, they are gods."Past Imperative" is the story of Edward Exeter, a young man accused of murdering his friend in mysterious circumstances. He is rescued from a hospital and sent to Nextdoor, where he is apparently known as the Liberator; prophecies in the unnervingly accurate Filoby Testament claim he will bring death to Death. Edward wants no part of this; he wants to return to England and enlist as a soldier. He spends much of the book avoiding various deities who would prefer not to deal with the Liberator and the chaos described in the Filoby Testament. A significant portion of "Past Imperative" is told from the point of view of Eleal Singer, a young girl who finds Edward when he first appears in Nextdoor. Those sections move slowly, especially near the beginning of the book. Edward's sections are more interesting, though they are also slow at first. The first two thirds of the book feel somewhat like a very extended first chapter, which sets up the main story. It's good to have a world developed in great detail, but it does make for rather tedious reading. At the end of the book, Edward has abandoned Eleal to avoid falling into the clutches of Tion, one of the Five great gods of Nextdoor, thus fulfilling parts of the Filoby Testament and the first third of an ominous prophecy given to him by a gypsy fortune-teller in England. Zath, the god of Death is still alive, and Edward is now completely alone in a strange world, with no way to contact the strangers who oppose the gods, and no way to get home. Thus far, the trilogy looks promising.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful!
Review: Absolutely teriffic book! I was fascinated how Duncan could mention such wild scenarios in an off-the-cuff way, then quietly fill in the gaps in following pages. I'm now searching for anything else he's done...
Rating:
Summary: Was totally hooked!
Review: As you can ask my dear friend, I was reading this book day and night! I finally finished it after reading it for TWO WHOLE DAYS!! I LOVED IT!! Keep in mind, it's a couple hundred pages and I would not put this down. Bravo!!!
Rating:
Summary: Was totally hooked!
Review: As you can ask my dear friend, I was reading this book day and night! I finally finished it after reading it for TWO WHOLE DAYS!! I LOVED IT!! Keep in mind, it's a couple hundred pages and I would not put this down. Bravo!!!
Rating:
Summary: Great first book, terrible series
Review: Duncan creates a great new parallel world, reminiscent of Mythago Wood or the Little Country (both great books). The characters are intelligent and compelling...for the first book at least. Unfortunately, by the end of the series, the characters act in increasingly bizarre ways, plotlines are completely dropped and forgotten, and the whole story is wrapped in a completely unsatisfying and boilerplate way.
Rating:
Summary: Great first book, terrible series
Review: Duncan creates a great new parallel world, reminiscent of Mythago Wood or the Little Country (both great books). The characters are intelligent and compelling...for the first book at least. Unfortunately, by the end of the series, the characters act in increasingly bizarre ways, plotlines are completely dropped and forgotten, and the whole story is wrapped in a completely unsatisfying and boilerplate way.
Rating:
Summary: Very interesting book
Review: Earlier this week, a fire broke out near where I live. So, being a volunteer for the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, I was asked to help out the Red Cross by providing communication between a shelter and the Red Cross headquarters. However, I was assigned the shift from midnight to 6. I've done this sort of thing before and I knew it was going to be slow. So, I grabbed a book at random. Obviously, it was "Past Imperative". After the first few chapters, I was worried, because the book didn't seem like something I'd be interested in and it was moving pretty slow. Nevertheless, I kept reading because I didn't have anything better to do. By the end of the second night shift, I had about 1/4 of the book left to read. Instead of going home and sleeping, I went home and finished the book. In short, it's a great book if you can make it past the beginning. Sorry there are no paragraph breaks in this review, but my web browser is very old.
Rating:
Summary: Very interesting book
Review: Earlier this week, a fire broke out near where I live. So, being a volunteer for the Amateur Radio Emergency Service, I was asked to help out the Red Cross by providing communication between a shelter and the Red Cross headquarters. However, I was assigned the shift from midnight to 6. I've done this sort of thing before and I knew it was going to be slow. So, I grabbed a book at random. Obviously, it was "Past Imperative". After the first few chapters, I was worried, because the book didn't seem like something I'd be interested in and it was moving pretty slow. Nevertheless, I kept reading because I didn't have anything better to do. By the end of the second night shift, I had about 1/4 of the book left to read. Instead of going home and sleeping, I went home and finished the book. In short, it's a great book if you can make it past the beginning. Sorry there are no paragraph breaks in this review, but my web browser is very old.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Read with some Flaws
Review: First the bitter, then the sweet. Only madness could have driven Dave Duncan to choose the opening he did. Three out of five opening chapters are told from the perspective of characters that turn out to be either very minor or never show up again. I had to keep reading the back of the book to remember where the story was actually going. By the time the reader figures out who the protagonists are, the urge to throw the book in the fire has already come upon her. This is unfortunate, because after a while, the book picks up pace, even if it never really escapes the lethargy and fogginess of those early chapters. They make it difficult to get too invested in the characters, because Duncan has introduced them at a distance--through the eyes of others. He also introduces far too many characters onto the stage to really keep them straight. I wasn't shedding any tears over any deaths, and wasn't shocked except once. And in a 450 page book, well, Robin Hobb would have had me bawling. The truth is that maybe none of the aforementioned problems would be that serious were it not for one overarching problem. The pacing is off. By the time you feel the story is really starting, you're almost at the end of the book. Now, it's a trilogy, so a certain amount of that kind of feeling is fair. But not quite to this extent. The transitions between Twentieth Century Earth and the fantasy world slow everything down. I admit that I was far more interested in the chapters on Nextdoor than I was about Earth. Moreover, in some respects, the Earth world seemed more foreign. Duncan tries to get across the naive view of warfare pre World War One. And he captures it while leaving us unable to really relate to it emotionally. We can feel the anxiety of Eleal on her foreign world. Those emotions ring true for us. Edward's obsession with fighting Germany while he's being pursued for murder just doesn't feel realistic, whether it is or not. In the end, I'm not sure people would be dying to read the sequel. As for myself, I'm curious about his deities and the magic system that he put into place. That's fun for me, but I prefer to read a book for reasons other than it concept and mechanics. On the whole, it was an interesting read with likable characters and a dry Brit wit. The writing is also crisp and clean, the setting interesting, and I even marked one page of description that is particularly vivid. It's good solid fantasy with a well-envisioned magic system. Insofar as it's an epic, it's off to a sluggish start. Insofar as it's a concept story, it's dazzling. The author is obviously learned and talented.
Rating:
Summary: A Good Read with some Flaws
Review: First the bitter, then the sweet. Only madness could have driven Dave Duncan to choose the opening he did. Three out of five opening chapters are told from the perspective of characters that turn out to be either very minor or never show up again. I had to keep reading the back of the book to remember where the story was actually going. By the time the reader figures out who the protagonists are, the urge to throw the book in the fire has already come upon her. This is unfortunate, because after a while, the book picks up pace, even if it never really escapes the lethargy and fogginess of those early chapters. They make it difficult to get too invested in the characters, because Duncan has introduced them at a distance--through the eyes of others. He also introduces far too many characters onto the stage to really keep them straight. I wasn't shedding any tears over any deaths, and wasn't shocked except once. And in a 450 page book, well, Robin Hobb would have had me bawling. The truth is that maybe none of the aforementioned problems would be that serious were it not for one overarching problem. The pacing is off. By the time you feel the story is really starting, you're almost at the end of the book. Now, it's a trilogy, so a certain amount of that kind of feeling is fair. But not quite to this extent. The transitions between Twentieth Century Earth and the fantasy world slow everything down. I admit that I was far more interested in the chapters on Nextdoor than I was about Earth. Moreover, in some respects, the Earth world seemed more foreign. Duncan tries to get across the naive view of warfare pre World War One. And he captures it while leaving us unable to really relate to it emotionally. We can feel the anxiety of Eleal on her foreign world. Those emotions ring true for us. Edward's obsession with fighting Germany while he's being pursued for murder just doesn't feel realistic, whether it is or not. In the end, I'm not sure people would be dying to read the sequel. As for myself, I'm curious about his deities and the magic system that he put into place. That's fun for me, but I prefer to read a book for reasons other than it concept and mechanics. On the whole, it was an interesting read with likable characters and a dry Brit wit. The writing is also crisp and clean, the setting interesting, and I even marked one page of description that is particularly vivid. It's good solid fantasy with a well-envisioned magic system. Insofar as it's an epic, it's off to a sluggish start. Insofar as it's a concept story, it's dazzling. The author is obviously learned and talented.
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