Review: The Griffin Mage Trilogy

The Griffin Mage Trilogy by Rachel Neumeier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Told in orotund epic-fantasy periods, with sentences that include not only semicolons, but colons, quite frequently at their centres (especially early on). Very serious, too, without much in the way of humour or lightheartedness - which is fine, but I note it because I enjoy some of that in a book. The griffins' names are multisyllabic, multivoweled, utterly unpronounceable and impossible to remember. All of this (plus the excessively repetitive making of the point that the griffins are not like humans, and the slow pace) put me off the first book when I attempted it in 2012, and I decided not to persevere with it based on the sample. I must have become more accepting of some of these elements in the nine years since, because this time I bought and finished the trilogy.

Despite the epic-fantasy-prose feel, the vocabulary is not especially high-flown and is used correctly, though it's sometimes repetitive, especially in the first book. The characters are reserved, and not given to angst or demonstrative feelings, and I think that leads some readers to have difficulty relating to them; it didn't bother me. There are female characters in both of the first two books who come across as neuro-atypical, who have difficulty understanding or caring about social conventions, though they're otherwise very different: an awkward rural 15-year-old and an absent-minded scholar in her (I think) 30s. The female lead in the third book is a little out of the ordinary too, but less markedly so. Unfortunately, the third book, while reintroducing the woman from book 1 as a significant character, makes almost no use of the woman from book 2; I felt this was a waste of potential.

There are a few dangling modifiers here and there, and the odd misplaced apostrophe for a plural possessive in the first book. In the second book, there are more errors, including apostrophes in a couple of words that are plural but not possessive, and that lost the whole trilogy the "well-edited" tag that I initially applied to it. The editing standard of the third book is the best of the three, with few if any issues.

In the second book, there are a couple of big convenient coincidences to help the plot along, which I consider a fault. Two people happen to be in a waiting room at the same time, and team up as a consequence. Someone needs a particular kind of assistant, and the perfect candidate just happens to present himself through an unlikely and unpredictable series of events. But the coincidences are "so the story can happen" coincidences rather than "rescue the plot from its own complications" coincidences, which is more forgivable, and the other two books don't have this reliance on coincidence.

Other reviewers have remarked on the worldbuilding and logistics, which aren't especially convincing or real-world-accurate sometimes, and the fact that the magic doesn't always make a lot of sense. I don't think it's intended to be the kind of magic that makes sense to a scientific way of thinking, though, so that part didn't bother me so much.

Overall, it's a little patchy, but at its best, I found it competently written, compelling, dramatic and enjoyable. I'll be looking out for other work from the author, who shows potential here, and has had some time and a few more books to build her abilities since these books were written.

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