Review: Very Good Book
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 4, 2013
Barbara Hambly's "The Darwath Trilogy:  The Time of the Dark, The Walls of Air, and the Armies of Daylight" is a very good piece of classic Fantasy.  Normally, in compilations like this, I write up the individual books and average out the ratings for the compilation.  In this case, I'm rating the trilogy as a whole (a Very Good 4 stars out of 5) since the individual books really don't stand on their own (the whole thing takes place over about 6 months of story time and those books flow one into the other without pause).  Anyway, for the positives, the writing is technically very good (and my Kindle version had only a few scanning errors) and the world, story, and four main characters are very interesting.  For the negatives, there's a lot of "slogging through the woods," the secondary characters (the Arch Bishop, the Chancellor, and the Advisor) are very standard in their purposes/behaviors, and in the last 5 percent of the book, even the main characters suddenly develop cases of brain failure (i.e., they jump to very obviously wrong conclusions).  Because of that, I came very close to dropping the book another star (to 3 stars).  But, since the whole thing provided me with a good, long, read, I decided to stick with the 4 star rating.