Blood Ties
Author – Pamela Freeman
Paperback
Pages: 480 pages
Publisher: Orbit Books
Release Date: April 7, 2008
ISBN-10: 0316033464
ISBN-13: 978-0316033466
A couple of months ago, I wrote an article about how I was feeling over saturated with Epic Fantasy. You know the kind – evil forces, semi-medieval world, lots of horses and swords and even a smattering of magic thrown in for good measure. It’s the kind of story I grew up on, but it just wasn’t floating my boat anymore.
Pamela Freeman was one of several authors to respond to the article and she had some interesting things to say about her first foray into adult fiction and why she’s trying to make a difference in the Epic Fantasy sub-genre:
I did a lot of reading in the genre for a doctorate, and I found that I was getting jaded, too – when I looked at why, I realised that a lot of secondary world writers were setting up the world and the magic in the first book, and then just letting the story/politics/war run to its conclusion, without revealing anything new. As a reader, I wasn’t getting a constantly renewed sense of wonder about the world, and since I read epic fantasy as least as much for the world as for the plot, I was getting bored.I kept wanting someone else to read the third book for me and just tell me what happened. I am trying hard not to let that happen in the Castings Trilogy, but maybe that means I’m slowing the plot down…nothing’s simple. The great advantage epic fantasy has is that it’s – epic; like Tolkien, I wanted to try my hand a really long story
Curious to see if Freeman could back up her words, I tossed Blood Ties into my backpack along with several other novels for the cross country journey. Could Freeman really be tackling Epic Fantasy in a new way?
The answer’s more complicated than a simple yes or no.
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