The Witchwood Crown (Last King of Osten Ard Book 1) Kindle Edition

Many others have already offered very good reviews of this book, so rather than recapitulate their observations, or waste your time with a detailed plot summary, I'll try to keep this relatively brief with just a few of my own observations that I hope will help you decide whether to buy this book.First, and foremost, it is an excellent book and worth your money and time. You will be engrossed throughout, at times moved by the surprisingly elegiac tone, and blown away by the intricate plotting and phenomenally detailed worldbuilding. In fact, this book, by all rights deserves a full five stars, six if that was possible; however, there is a serious problem that damages the overall work. It's not a fatal flaw, but an unexpected misstep from one of our most proficient fantasy authors. I'll discuss it a little at the end of the review beneath a spoiler warning.1. You need not have ready the earlier trilogy, "Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn," but if you have, you will enjoy this book much more with that context since a good deal of it references famous events from those books. And, of course, many old friends and memorable characters are at the center of the action here.2. Again, it isn't necessary to read "The Heart of What Was Lost," the prequel volume published earlier, but that book does provide context as well as important characterizations and plotlines. As always, the writing itself is a pure pleasure to read.3. This book has a great many viewpoint characters, but don't be daunted. The characterizations are so deft that you will have no difficulty keeping them straight, even with the many scene shifts early in the book, even if you are unfamiliar with the people and places of Osten Ard. In fact, the characters are so well drawn that it is almost never a problem to identify which character we are following without being told immediately after the scene shifts. That alone is a feat of technical craftsmanship that few authors of multiple viewpoint fiction can equal. Williams has always been good at this, but The Witchwood Crown is absurdly good at this.4. With each book, Williams has found new ways to plumb the depths of characters over a wide moral spectrum. Some characters, e.g., Prince Morgan, are exasperating, but they are also entirely believable as people. Everyone is well motivated. There are many minor characters who have their own stories and sorrows, which are not given short shrift. Two characters are identified at the end of the book in a really clever bit of sleight of hand to be a lot more important then assumed. They also neatly interweave several other plot strands. I was so impressed by that feat, which took me completely by surprise. Such a fine bit of writing is emblematic of Williams's work and one of the reasons why I have read all of his books, a few more than once.I could go on, praising the theological, anthropological and linguistic elements, but I promised to try to keep it short (but that is an impossible feat when dealing with such a complex and deep story). I will say that of all the marvelous worldbuilding, I continue to consider Williams's meditations on both personal and political history to be his greatest forte. This world has astonishing depth and texture and even when there seem to be contradictory narrative elements, the reader can be safe in knowing that the author has thought it all through with a formidable confidence.Spoiler warning! Below, I will take a moment to discuss the one big problem I had with the book, what I consider a rare mistake by such a polished author.Two of the viewpoint characters, Jarnulf and Nezeru act in such an implausible way that their advancement of the plot becomes problematic. This is especially distressing since they are a critical component of the overall plot and they will be crucial to the action in the next book, and probably even the denouement of the third. I won't go into detail on Jarnulf, but Nezeru, especially, is not credible. She is supposed to be an experienced Talon and has been carefully forged to be entirely loyal to the Queen of the Norns. It is barely possible that she would hesitate to kill a child in cold blood, but even she can't explain why she hesitates (and, of course, later she does indeed kill many women and children, albeit in defense of her own life). But she tells Mahko a lie which I sympathize with, but it is not at all a credible falsehood and I don't think Mahko would believe it, nor would Nezeru think such a sadistic hardcase would accept it. Here, I believe, the author became a bit squeamish about being forced to depict constant sexual abuse of a character we are meant to like. Also, it is clearly part of the plan to create a schism with her fellow Talons. But much worse, later, after only knowing Jarnulf a short time, she decides to keep quiet about his shooting an arrow with a message on it that she can't read that endangers not just her, but the entire mission of her Hand. Sacrifices obviously are not going to sing their death song until they are in utter extremis and they would never write it down and shoot it out into an enemy camp. Nor would a cunning and clever man like Jarnulf ever believe she would. It's just a bad decision all the way around, done purely to advance the plot. Even after she learns that Jarnulf's message arrow damaged a protective spell keeping them all safe from certain death. In reality, she would have killed him outright, even if he is intriguing and she is currently being tormented by Mahko. Then, to compound this betrayal, she also doesn't mention that none of his arrows killed anyone during their escape. He is clearly a spy. But instead of watching him carefully and making a decision about whether to kill him, or tell Mahko, she has a conversation with him in which she reveals that she suspects him of spying, such an unlikely and massive error in judgment for a Queen's Talon that it made me much more skeptical of her entire presence in the book.I apologize. This has gone on far too long and an Amazon review is not really an appropriate venue for detailed literary criticism, but there were many more problems that arose from her actions and inactions that frustrated me because Tad Williams is one of the most proficient authors in creating plot that arises directly from character and is normally flawless in execution. This isn't fixable in the next book, unfortunately, so it will just continue to be a nagging issue that is unresolvable. It is a rare serious error by a writer I admire very much. It doesn't ruin the book, but it mars what could have been a masterpiece of epic fantasy. Also, it could have been dealt with much more subtly and believably. But that, again, veers into detailed critique and I have already spent too much time here. Anyway, they are fun characters who have great chemistry and I am sure future books will explore that relationship. Williams is an expert at evolving relationships between men and women and I know I will enjoy how this plays out over time.

The author really has the knack for bringing his fantasy world come alive! The characters were crystal clear, you could picture the layout of the land/setting without much effort and the plot kept the reader guessing what was going to come next. Yet, despite all of the kudos, none of the characters endeared themselves to me. It won’t stop me from going right on to the next book in this series, though…..

Decades ago, I bought a paperback copy of The Dragonbone Chair and fell in love with the story and the characters. So when I heard that Tad Williams was finally going to write a follow up to his original Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy, I was both excited and worried—excited that I would get to revisit his world and its characters, worried that it wouldn’t live up to the earlier series. Well, both the worldbuilding and the storytelling are still wonderful, even if this first book didn’t quite grab me the same way The Dragonbone Chair did.It’s been over 30 years since Ineluki the Storm King and the Norns were defeated. King Simon and Queen Miriamele have ruled wisely and well, but problems have started to crop up in the outlying provinces. The king of Hernystir subtly slights Simon and Miri on a state visit. The Duke of Nabban is being challenged by other lords of the Nabbani noble houses. The Thrithings men are attacking Nabbani settlers encroaching on their territory. Simon has not heard from his friend Prince Jiriki of the Sithi for years, in spite of hopes for closer ties between humans and the Fair Ones. Now, perhaps most troubling of all, there are signs that the Norns are beginning to be active again in the North.Simon and Miri also have more personal concerns. Duke Isgrimnur and other heroes of the conflict with the Norns are passing away. Prince Josua and his family disappeared years ago, and no one has been able to find out what happened to them. Membership in the League of the Scroll has been seriously depleted, with only a few members remaining to share their wisdom. Simon and Miri’s only son died young, and their heir is their grandson Morgan, a seventeen-year-old princeling who is more interested in gambling and drinking than in learning the intricacies of statecraft.Readers learn all of this in the opening chapters of the novel. This is a Tad William’s book, so of course there’s a lot more story left to tell. What seems clear from the way he sets the stage (and from the subtitle of the book, The Last King of Osten Ard) is that there will be widespread conflict and the potential for great loss as Simon and Miri try to hold everything together. At one point, Simon muses that he and Miri are supposed to be living the “happily after” of their tale, but clearly that’s not the case. The biggest question in my mind is whether the theme of this trilogy is the passing of an era and the establishment of a new order. What will remain of Osten Ard, and what (and who) will be lost?Although I liked the meaty plot shaping up in this book, it didn’t quite have the same magic for me as The Dragonbone Chair did all those years ago. I think it’s because there isn’t really a strong linchpin character to anchor the action as Simon did in the first trilogy. While lots of other characters (particularly Miri) played important roles, the heart of those books was Simon and his adventures, particularly as they shaped his growth from a boy innocently dreaming of being a hero to a man who knows that heroism is a myth, that it simply involves doing what needs to be done, with pain and death along the way. Simon really can’t carry the action this time around, because as Miri regularly points out, he’s the king, and not a young one, either. He can’t just ride off to the Aldheorte forest to search for Jiriki himself; others must act in his stead. (I wonder—if this trilogy is about the passing of an era, and Simon is still at the heart of the story, if not the action—is it also about the passing of a king?)The new characters who play the biggest roles in the plot of this book don’t have the same appeal for me as Simon. There’s Morgan, who displays all of Simon’s boyhood stubbornness and sulkiness without his redeeming qualities (at least so far); Nezeru, whose half-Norn, half-human perspective is a little too foreign for me to fully sympathize with her; and Jarnulf, a mysterious Black Rimmersman who is apparently working against the Norns. I hope they will grow on me as the story continues, or other new characters—like Josua’s missing son and daughter—come to the forefront later in the series.Obviously, this is a must-read for anyone who loved Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. Even if they haven’t read the earlier books, readers who enjoy big epic fantasies with a huge cast and lots of plot will probably like this novel, especially since they won’t have any of my reservations about the book and can just dive into the story.An eARC of this novel was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. And then I bought it, because how could I not?

I wanted to know what happened after the dragon bone chair...now I will. Worth the wait

As I said I loved the previous books. I can't read a lot of fantasy books because they are generally a bit silly, if you get a good one though they can be great.I felt when I started reading this that it was a sequel. A success revisited hence the 4 stars not five. I should say I got into the second half far more and high hopes for the next one.

The Dragonbone Chair: Memory, Sorrow & Thorn Book 1  is a trilogy I read on publication many years ago. It's also a trilogy I've re-read on numerous occasions in the intervening 24 years since To Green Angel Tower landed in hardback. Aside from a rather slow section around the ghant nest, the books are pretty much near perfect as far as fantasy novels go. They have been hugely influential in what has come afterwards, and let's not forget that a lot of what we now consider fantasy classics were written afterwards (A Song of Ice and Fire, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Robin Hobbs entire library of fantasy, and most of the Wheel of Time).Returning to a set of much loved characters is always a challenge, especially when the sequel series is not set immediately after the original and this new series, The Last King of Ostern Ard, is set 34 years after the events of the preceding book*. A risk then but a risk Williams has carried off with aplomb. Not only do the characters "feel" right- they behave, speak and interact as the reader expects them to, they have aged and grown up realistically too. Simon hasn't been the perfect king, and other characters flaws are all too visible. It just works, and that is as great a compliment as a fan of the series can give. I genuinely feels like a proper continuation in terms of characters and continuity.*ignoring the novella The Heart of What Was Lost. The Dragonbone Chair: Memory, Sorrow & Thorn Book 1

Giving this book three stars feels odd, after the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy formed such an important core of my childhood fantasy upbringing, but this is a book that has lost its way.The writing style is as good as it's always been, the world as well-furnished and interesting, and the conspiracies running beneath the tale as important a draw into the pages as they were years ago. But there are three major flaws that prevent The Whitchwood Crown from challenging its prequels, ones I hope don't become a feature of this new series.1) This book could have used a brutal editing process. For what is largely setup for another epic tale it runs maybe twice as long as it should, with most of the first two-thirds of the book being a long trudge through unimportant and repetitive foundations and side-issues. By the time the story actually gets going, from around page 500, I'd be unsurprised if many readers had already given up. Most of these first two-thirds could be cut out, and entire perspective characters ditched, without having any impact on the story. It would probably have built a more compelling and exciting first entry if they had been.2) Fantasy fiction has changed in the past 30 years, but the depiction of women in The Whitchwood Crown seems pinned down in the 80s. Every time a new woman is introduced it's a chance to play cliche bingo. Will they be an overbearing nag? An innocent and naive object of affection of every male figure they come across? A traumatised (sometimes pretty ham-fistedly) and over-emotional "strong female character"? All of them will immediately be sexualised, though the men seem to be allowed to get away without. Most disappointing was the reduction of Miriamelle to a shadow of her former self.3) I genuinely don't know if this is something I simply missed as a kid or a new spin but the obviousness with which some of the cultures/races are cribbed from shallow depictions of real-world cultures could be jarring. To get halfway through a fascinating depiction of Norn society and run right into a rough stereotype of East-Asian culture and people could really tear you out of the moment.Should you buy this book? If you were a huge fan of the original trilogy and have the time, or reading speed, to dedicate to churning through 500 pages of build-up before the story gets started - yes. As much as it has its flaws it's good to be back in Osten Ard. If not? I'd give it a pass. Or maybe just start on the centrefold.

I was looking forward to this and reread the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy in anticipation. Sadly halfway through this one I realised that I was uninterested in the subplots and the characters, even those I was familiar with, left me cold. When I realised that I was starting to mentally rearrange and edit the book I gave up and removed the download. And yes he still is rubbish at female characters.