Melissa's Reviews > Fortune's Blade

Mircea, the father I loved and distrusted in equal measure — could he be sincere this time. Or was this just another game?

The amount of lines, paragraphs, whole chapters, entire multiple-book-long arcs that have covered this sentiment in Chance’s nearly twenty books is diabolical.

What’s even worse is that the answer is always the same.

Yes, Mircea cares. He cares in his specifically overbearing and manipulative way of his. I need this series to move on from this conflict. This universe’s Mircea problem is a little ridiculous at this point. Every protagonist has been unforgivably victimised by him in some way — and he’s always forgiven. There’s a discussion between Mircea and Cassie here about if the mother of Dory and Dorina will ever forgive him, too.

Trust me: she will.

Fortune’s Blade is our first, extensive foray into Faerie in Dory’s series, and the results are largely disappointing. I thought the dual-perspectives of Dory and Dorina might shake up the storytelling, but we just get the same harried scrambling through action sequences that go on far longer than they should. Often multiple chapters of “and then, and then, and THEN,” and while Chance’s flourish and spectacle have been one of the major selling points, her characters always came first in my opinion.

To recap, then, Zeus wanted to use Dorina, Aeslinn and his puppet Steen wanted to kill her, and if she got to the portal before either of those things happened, whatever was on the other side might be even worse.

Which is why I struggled with this instalment. Aside from reiterating the sense of loss both Dory and Dorina have without the other, and then having someone give them a pep-talk, there isn’t much else here.

I also found Dorina and Ray’s build-up and romance here lacking, which is baffling to me. After pairings like Cassie and Pritkin, and Dory and Louis-Cesare, it didn’t even occur to me to worry about the romance in this book. I was fairly confident if all else disappoints, that wouldn’t. This might have something to do with actually not realising Chance was setting up a romance between them until Dorina’s first chapter in Fortune’s Blade where Ray lays it on thick, to Marlowe’s amusement. And maybe Ray’s relationship with Dory colouring my view of their connection in the last instalment.

Either way, we didn’t even have Dory and Louis-Cesare to fall back on: they were too busy either fighting, fleeing or grievously injured to do much more than pass exposition between each other. And that’s only when one could hear the other. Unfortunately, the story itself isn't terribly engaging either.

My disinterest in the dragon-palooza is due to it not being tethered to any one particularly compelling character or idea, even. It’s not enough to state over and over how important this and that alliance is — or how threatening someone else is, either — I need to appreciate it before everything goes to hell.

This isn’t helped by the action feeling extremely passive. The only time I actually connected with an action scene is when Dory finally killed Steen with Louis-Cesare’s help. It reminded me of when she tore her way through the body of one of those monstrous birds at the end of Midnight’s Daughter. The violence was a desperate, furious reaction to a personal threat, rather than the continuous and borderline impersonal threats that plague this book.

On a completely different note, when Louis-Cesare and Dory stumble on a naked Ray and a naked (and seemingly drugged) Dorina, the fact that their minds so quickly and definitively go to thinking Ray drugged and raped her is alarming.

The book ends with Mircea, Dorina and their mother lost in another world and Dory determined to find them. As far as cliffhangers go, its a decent one, but I just hope Chance can find a better balance between spectacle and character by then.