Book Review: 1 Treasure  Box

The Complete Amber Chronicles, books 6 -10 (Last half of the Novels of the Towering Fantasy Saga)

These books are quite different than the first 5*, in that there is much more magic in these books and they deal more with the Courts of Chaos. The last 6 books take place a number years after the happy conclusion of the succession and the repair to the pattern. These books are told from Merlin, son of Corwin’s point of view and he is a sorcerer who is living on our shadow earth where he went to college received a degree and was working at a computer company as a programmer.

I liked the way book 6 starts, where Merlin has just quit his job as a programmer and wants to go on to the other things including work on his own special unique program that he has created in a different shadow world. However, first he must deal with the annual April 30 attempt on his life. The story starts right in with a number of mysteries.  I also liked the descriptions of Chaos, I thought they were very imaginative and descriptive.

However there were numerous problems with the story and I found Merlin’s character to be a bit bland. I also found the non-stop problems that kept coming up a to be a bit contrived.  Plus, Merlin seemed to spend a lot of time explaining his situation to anyone who would listen and half of these people were enemies so it did not make much sense as to why he kept doing so.

During the book Merlin kept mentioning how Corwin was missing and that he wanted to  find him, then it  was very simplified in how he found him and also very sketchy as to how Corwin was kept prisoner as he was. There were also several things that were mentioned but were never properly resolved, which I found very unsatisfactory.  Things like what happened to Carol, what happened to the Jewel and why was it put into Carol’s eye.  It seemed really dumb, if the jewel is so important, there would be a better place to keep it, and since it is in her eye, why not just kill her and get the jewel?  Also, they address the second pattern, but not what is going to happen with it.  The book sort of explained why Jurt did a complete turnaround, from trying to kill Merlin to helping him, but did not ever explain why Jurt hated Merlin so much.  Over all, I felt it was a very unsatisfying ending.

*See my blog on books 1-5 for more information about Amber.

Book six: Trumps of Doom, Book seven: Blood of Amber, Book eight: Sign of Chaos, Book nine: Knight of Shadows, Book ten: Prince of Chao