A Time of Exile by Katherine Kerr

You find an author. Their ideas intrigue you, their stories thrill you. You gobble up a series, and then you find out there's another one. Glee! Joy!

But the experience is not glee and joy. Something's not quite right. The new ideas aren't interesting. The old ideas no longer carry the show at best, or feel rehashed and stale at worse. And, sooner or later, you're not longer reading your favourite author, you're reading something that feels like a fan fic of them. 

I feel like most of the Epic Fantasy fans in the audience (and do I have any other audience?) know what I'm talking about. Has to have happened with at least one author, right? Maybe multiple. Maybe most of them. Part of the joy of re-reads is finding out when your memory is playing tricks on you because I'll be honest, I thought Katherine Kerr was one of those authors, but not here she isn't.

One of the big reasons for that is I'm a sucker for a strong theme that you see repeated again and again in a book, and we get this in spades here. Every strand of the book is about having to choose and what it is to lose when you do choose and leave what you can't take behind. It's right there in the name. Buy in to that theme and let it guide you to the characters' emotions like I did and you'll really enjoy A Time of Exile.

If those arcs of loss and exploration aren't doing it for you, however, then this book may not be for you. A Time of Exile doesn't really have a lot to offer other than these journeys. There's a number of pleasant character dynamics, and a lot of delving into worldbuilding questions posed by the first quartet, but much as I enjoyed those elements I don't think they're capable of carrying the story. It's a very different experience from most of what went into Deverry before and it's only in the last third we really get the blend of bloody war and grasping politics that was so much of the original hook in Daggerspell. Of course, what made Daggerspell so great is that that blend was always mixed in with the big personal journeys I mention in the prior paragraph. Here it is separated. It doesn't work so well.

In a mild tangent, when I was in a chat with fellow blogger Rin, someone mentioned a book rating system based around assigning scores to multiple areas then averaging them out. My response was that interesting as I found the idea, I didn't think it would work for me as basically I mostly grade on the great and abysmal in a book. A Time of Exile is perfect proof for this. I think it's great because it nails theme (which isn't even an area of interest in this system now I look again, boo and hiss) but have to admit on a lot of areas, it's kinda just okay to good.

Doing reviews for books deep in old series is something of a happy thing as I know I'm not really selling the book either way. There's very few people out there who've read Darkspell and are wondering whether to pick up the next one. This is me waffling on for my own amusement, and for once I think I've actually been concise and to the point. But to be even more concise, for said few who are reading - A Time of Exile makes a few tweaks to the Deverry recipe and has a slanted execution in how it does so, and this will make it very unlikely everyone loves all of the book evenly. But for those who love watching the characters choose and lose, they'll love enough of it that it doesn't matter.