Shadowheart
Author – Tad Williams
Hardcover
Pages: 672
Publisher: DAW Books
Release Date: November 30, 2010
ISBN-10: 9780756406400
ISBN-13: 978-0756406400
To really understand Tad Williams’ Shadowmarch series, and my ultimate appreciation of it, one must look back to the rocky road of the original conceptualization and execution of its first novel, also titled Shadowmarch.
First conceived as a television show described by Williams as “Hill Street Blues meets Babylon 5 meets Lord of the Rings,” then as a free online serialization, Shadowmarch went through many forms in its infancy. Readers were finally introduced to the story when Williams released Shadowmarch on his website as a free-flowing piece-by-piece novel — an avenue that’s not unusual for aspiring writers hoping to catch the eye of a publisher, but an odd move for an author as well established as Williams. Eventually, due to a lack of readers willing to pony up the cash necessary to read beyond the first five chapters, the project changed course again and was converted into a full-fledged, traditionally published series. At this time, Shadowmarch was heavily re-written, added-to and even saw a shift from present tense to a more traditional third-person past-tense narrative.
Unfortunately, and despite the heavy revisions, these serialized roots left their mark all over the early volumes of the series. Though enjoyable (and the novel that finally convinced me of Williams as a novelist, after several failed attempts to read his classic Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy), Shadowmarch felt much like a novel looking for a plot. Things happened, characters were introduced, a world was built, but it never quite felt like Williams knew where the road led or had an ultimate plan in mind for the series. The potential was there, the bones were there, but the series was searching for a proper heart and soul.
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