Review: Excellent Sample of a Satisfying, Professionally Written Celtic Historical
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2012
This e-book contains the first third of The Silver Wheel, a good old fashioned historical novel set in the time period around Boudica's revolt. It doesn't stand alone, which some reviewers have noted, however, it has been made available for free to give readers a chance to get into the story. As I'm one of those who believe authors deserve to get paid for the many months of hard work they put into the novels they write, I have no problem with an author giving me a big chunk free in the hope that I'll like it enough to pay to read the rest of the story.In this case, I did just that, buying the full ebook of The Silver Wheel after reading through Lady of the Moon in one sitting. So I'm very glad that the author gave me this big chunk free as this book starts out a bit slow after which the pace and quality of the writing picks up. If I had only read the usual 20 page sample, I might have missed out on a satisfying read.Having read a lot of free downloads of late, I was particularly pleased to find out how well-written the bulk of this book is. It's unfortunate that the weakest writing was in the first pages of book where a too-modern tone occasionally crept in. However, as I got into the story, that faded out and the quality of writing was exactly what I'd expect to find in a mainstream published hardcover historical novel.The Silver Wheel is in the tradition of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Celtic priestess novels, though it actually tells a better story than they do. (I love MZB's Darkover books but found the plotting fo the Celtic stories not in the same league as those were.)I'm baffled by the reviewers who call the heroine "whiny", I didn't experience her that way at all. But I've also noticed that reviewers who use that term so dismissively are often quite whiny themselves, judging from their reviews. Perhaps the heroine is in some odd way a mirror for the reader? I thought the author did a great job of taking us into the mind of someone living in the time that her story is set and within its culture. She also brings the world of the Celts of that time to life with lots of wonderful details obviously based on lots of research into archeological finds. I love historical novels that make me feel like I've done a bit of time traveling and this book did that extremely well.I particularly liked the way that she didn't turn this book into a conventional romance and allowed the main characters to have a very different approach to relationships that we take now.The only thing that annoyed me a bit early on in this story, which fortunately faded out after the early chapters, was the author's putting into the mouth of Drui priests some New Age spiritual language that was unknown, even in the USA, until the mid-1980s. I'm not sure why it was there as in the rest of the story the language used to convey heroine's spiritual outlook is presented in a much more down-to-earth, universal way.