Black Trillium (from Ex Libris)

7/2-7/3/05—Black Trillium by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May and Andre Norton
The comment above about the lack of denoument? Ditto here. Apparently I know little about genre fantasy/sci-fi. My biggest aggravation with this book was the mountains of terms, place names and character names that I, as a reader, was expected to remember. I thought it was best for a novel to have ten main characters or less? This one was published and sold, but yeah, I can see why Carolyn Haines would swear by that rule. I finally gave up on keeping everything and everyone straight and simply kept reading. The book could’ve been much shorter as well. The authors seem to much joy in trying to prove how creative they can be in torturing the three princesses (which I thought, by the way, were a bit too cliché—triple goddess, blonde, redhead and brunette—yeah, I get it—hit me over the head with a brick, why don’t you?). And where they could’ve spent more time was in the exploration of what happened to the Vanished Ones. The Archimage Binah implies that she’ll tell Haramis, but then the idea is dropped. Er, did somebody drop the ball here or are we to wait for it to show up in the next installment??? I know I’m rusty on the whole area of Sci-fi/Fantasy, but if this is the best of the best that’s out there—I can do this!!!