Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Now that I've slogged my way through all 6 books in the series (more or less - you can't blame me for skipping through patches just to keep my large intestine from leaping up to strangle my brain, a la Grunthos the Flatulent), I feel I can give a better review, based on the perspective of the whole. Or do I mean hole ?

Since this is a review that looks at the series in a general, over-arcing way, I will try to hide spoilers for the rest of the books, for those that insist on subjecting yourselves to the pain of continuing onward. I'm not judging you - I did it myself, mainly because I thought the other books had to get better - but I give you fair warning.

When I first started the series, I was intrigued by the premise: half-faerie girl sold into slavery, escapes, and goes on an epic journey. But the story quick deteriorated from there. Small was no Tolkien. Or Burroughs. Or Jordan. Or - oh, you get the picture! I found myself actually feeling embarrassed for the author at various stages of the series. Although I enjoyed some of her historical romance books, due to the feeling of period and atmosphere she was capable of creating, here I felt she struggled with trying to create an entire fantasy world, with its own interior logic. Clearly drawing from existing fantasy works, and leaning strongly on faerie folklore and Norse mythology, Small appeared to get tangled up in what to keep or discard from her sources of inspiration. There is either too much scope (she might have done better to keep it to a trilogy) or too little scope - for as Lara traipses from one locale to the next, despite the change of landscape, the characters end up feeling much the same. Small's foreshadowing is heavy - every major character gets a good dose, to the point where I, as a reader, just lost interest. Lara's "destiny" being one example - at some point, you just want the author to fish or cut bait, already.

Since a lot has been said here of Lara's irritating perfections - I'd like to laughingly point out that, as someone who is pretty damn clueless about her supposed destiny, and what exactly the hell that entails, she's basically the Forrest Gump of the Hetar series. (view spoiler)[ Add to that the fact that she is paired with the ultimate know-it-all guy in Kaliq, who guides (manipulates?) her through the whole damn thing, and Lara loses some of that annoyance factor. (hide spoiler)]

I'm not hyper-sensitive to the many, many sex scenes (I can see "manroot" has triggered a lot of reviewers) Small included. However, I did get really tired of the over-emphasized mantra of "that's all the women are here for" repeated in most of the kingdoms throughout, which, of course, meant that Lara had to show everyone in the series how much butt she could kick - while also "taking pleasures" (honestly, that was the repeated phrase that made me start to twitch) with whoever she wants to bonk. The borrowed bits of faerie folklore used to manufacture Lara's character were a handy "out" in most cases; (view spoiler)[oh, she doesn't have a completely mortal heart, she has a faerie's "fickle" heart, so she goes from mourning to gang bangs without much of a pause. (hide spoiler)] Frankly, it made Lara a less sympathetic character than she might have been. And there is a sameness to the sexual encounters overall in the series - you could switch the names out at any given time and for the most part (view spoiler)[except when there's multiple "parts" to be had (hide spoiler)] you wouldn't know which characters were at it. I found myself wondering if Small actually had a quota for how many sex scenes to include per book - that gave me a bit of a giggle.

I will say, the "light" and "dark" issue was a burr under my butt that just didn't go away, over all 6 books. Over-simplification, anyone? I'm not disparaging the depiction of evil as real, but Lara's judgement was really suspect, as someone supposedly "of the light", who won't acknowledge the possibility that a good person can do something bad, and a bad person can do something good. That just wrecks a character's insight and foresight.

As a side comment - how many "d'oh!" moments are they allowed in this series? The main characters would've had permanent marks on their foreheads for all the times they needed to smack themselves and say, "Oh shoot - I should've thought of that!". Bad plot device to get around previous resolutions.

There are a couple of positives to admit to: I liked some of the lesser characters, (view spoiler)[ notably Jonah, Nidhug the insecure dragon (as I call her), and a few others, whose names I can't recall now that I've finished book 6. (hide spoiler)]

For those that are curious about the great "destiny" of Lara, I will end with a little spoiler rant, which I will hide, so you other intrepid souls can ignore it and go back to your reading of the series.

(view spoiler)[ Oh, bollocks! I've just finished book 6 of the Hetar series, "Crown of Destiny", before I sat down to write this review. I would have laughed all through the final pages, if I hadn't been so damn annoyed. All the hints that Lara's destiny was about saving all the kingdoms or uniting them together, and it comes down to this ending?! Seriously? I thought better of Small, I really did. To resort to Lara and Kaliq making-out while suspended out in the Cosmos, in order to create Earth? Unbe-f@&*ing-lievable. These two oh-so-perfect-and-wise characters manage to make a right muck out of the universe they were in, so they leave it all behind and do the planetary two-step, accompanied by the rest of the gang-bang brothers, and voila - you get the solar system. My willing suspension of disbelief just got a double-portion of manroot right up the back entry with this one. (hide spoiler)]