Path of Fate

Path of Fate (2003) Diana Pharoah Francis

This book had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, when it lost my attention in the beginning of the book, it never really regained it, even though the story got better.

Reisil is a tark. (Actually: A healer. Why they just couldn’t call her a healer is beyond me.) Because she was an orphan, raised by the town where she lives, she grew up desperate for a home and a place of her own, and becoming a healer provided here with that, plus the ability to care for the people who raised her when she had no other family. Unfortunately, her calm and happy future is threatened when she is called to be one of the ahalad-kaaslane–individuals who are chosen by the Blessed Lady to serve the land, and are bonded with an animal.

My main point of contention was this: The cover shows a realistically dressed woman, wrist properly bound with leather, holding a raptor. Cool! I thought, I love covers that are realistic and reasonable! So it’s obvious that Reisil is going to become an ahalad-kaaslane. Unfortunately, she spends the first 95 pages denying that bond. The one that from the cover is obviously going to happen.

I found this infuriating. She was going to accept the bird, so why couldn’t she just accept it, get it over with, and get ON with the STORY. I was so annoyed by this that I put Path of Fate down three or four times during the first hundred pages, to read other books.

But the story wasn’t bad, so I kept trying. And eventually, once she accepted that she was a ahalad-kaaslane, the story finally took off. Unfortunately, I had a residual level of annoyance at the main character, and so never really got sucked into the story–just in case the main character did something else really stupid, and I had to give up on the book entirely. No more stupidity occurred, but that wariness kept me from getting really involved in the story.

I think that if she had condensed the first hundred pages into something much shorter, I would have really enjoyed this book. Unfortunately, she didn’t, and so I came away feeling that the book was just okay, and that it really could have been a lot better than it was.

There were some things that I did like: I liked how she planned well, and excluding the stupidity at the start of the story, was a reasonable, level-headed woman. She kept things from her companions, but only because she was justified in not being able to trust them. And once she knew she could trust them, she shared what she knew. I also liked the fact that her healing took energy, just like physical labor would. I also liked, towards the end, the respect that the Blessed Lady and the Dark Lord had for each others boundaries.

One other point particularly bothered me: how bit was the town where Reisil grew up. It seems to switch between small town, and medium to large size city, so I couldn’t quite get a handle on it. Additionally, threads were started, and then somewhat ended rather perfunctorily. We get a lot of time and energy invested into Reisil’s enmity with Juhrnus, then suddenly it’s all over? I found it rather unsatisfactory. Perhaps things sometimes happen that way in real life, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to me in this story.

So I felt that the story had good potential, but simply didn’t live up to my expectations. As I said, if the first hundred pages had been compressed somehow, and I’d not gotten completely annoyed with the Reisil and the story, I might have enjoyed it more, and been more willing to ignore the other, smaller, flaws.
Rating: 5/10

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