Tad Williams Shadowmarch
 

Anyone read this? I loved the Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series and was wondering if this book was any good.

I adored Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series as well so I have this on my list. I think I wait till next book is due and that way it will ease the pain some if its really good. I sure know it helped with the Obsidian Trilogy.

I was introduced to Tad Williams via Tailchaser's Song, and eagerly picked up the first book in the series about some kind of alternate dimension thing. It was so bad I've already forgotten what it was called. I slogged my through the first M,S&T book, and wanted to cry it was so boring.

Am I expecting too much from Williams? I'm not so petty as to want infinite Tailchaser sequels or something silly like that, but I just don't like his other stuff. What's up with that?

Milo, Williams always takes a while to get going. He thinks of his projects as single books, no matter what the length they wind up being. But he seems to keep the same sort of structure, so where a novel takes about 50-100 pages to get going, Williams' first novel in a series takes about 300 or so. What that means is that single titles like Tailchaser's Song, are much easier to just pick up because the background he wants to give the reader doesn't bog down the narrative. M,S,& T is an all time fave of mine and the first half (at least) of The Dragon Bone Chair is fairly skipable. Ditto for the other series. Otherland is about 75% done by the time it seems the story really gets going. I think that has something to do with the fact that he REALLY DID write that whole series as a single book and then cut them up into four.

I liked MS&T and Otherland, but they sure did take their time to get going.

War of the Flowers was pretty good and it was only one volume, so that may be more to yur tastes, Milo.

Those are somewhat encouraging, I may try the MS&T series again. The Otherland one, I think I just didn't like the setting.

What's the setting of War of the Flowers?

Medieval Fairyland. The basic plot is a guy from our world gets sucked into a land where there are a bunch of noble houses at war with each other. Our hero gets caught up in the war and high adventure ensues.

Like all of Williams' stuff, ti starts slow and takes time to build, but since it's all in one volume, "slow" is relative (I liked Otherland, but the entire first book was building -- the action didn't really start until book two).

Didn't read this (yet) but I loved Tailchaser and Memory Sorrow Thorn. Was extremely disappointed by how uninteresting Otherworld was, especially as I waited for the whole series to come out and read it all at once. War of the Flowers was better, but didn't touch his first two works in my opinion.

I'm about 125 pages into it, and I don't think I'm going to continue. Think it's time for Feast of Crows. It just isn't holding my attention at all. I'll pick it back up later, but I think I'm going to bail right now.