D. B. Grace's Reviews > Lord of the Changing Winds

I'm not quite sure what to say about this.

Was I compelled? Yes. Did I ENJOY it? Mostly no.

This book starts with Kes, a teenager from a small, pastoral town who has never quite fit in with the others around her. She doesn't talk much, has a quiescent personality, and prefers wandering the hills alone to things other girls of her age enjoy. Then, griffins arrive near Kes's small town, and she learns that she is to become a fire mage and a healer.

Kes isn't mad about this. It seems like she would be perfectly happy with this fate, except that the griffins have brought with them a geopolitical conflagration and war is thus on the horizon.

The griffins are interesting. They sort of occupy the same fantasy ecological niche as dragons: alien, powerful, may or may not hunt and eat people, always operating on a totally different wavelength than humanity. The prose, specifically when it centers on the griffins or their desert, waxes lyrical about their inhuman nature, ruthless beauty, etc. I don't feel that we really get to know them very well, and I don't LIKE them, but I feel like both of these things may be deliberate. They are meant to be compelling and off-putting at the same time.

The other half of this story follows Bertaud, a young nobleman in service to the king of Feierabiand, whom he is deeply loyal to and loves like an older brother. He becomes mired in the griffin problem when he leads a military sortie out to drive them from the land. It doesn't go as planned, and soon Feierabiand is on the brink of a three-pronged war with the griffins, and neighboring rival kingdom Casmantium.

It's a powder keg situation, with the griffins and Feierabiand alternately clashing and maneuvering to avoid war. The two peoples struggle to understand each other, even with Kes and Bertaud as go-betweens.

The griffins act aggressive and off-putting, but they perceive themselves as acting with perfect rationality and the humans as showing disrespect and hostility. This is obviously as intended, but it's also unpleasant. Even the two griffins we spend the most time with (I'm not even going to try to spell their names) I never felt like I could invest in as characters.

It was difficult for me to like anyone here. I possibly could have liked Bertaud. It was compelling the way his loyalty to the king was tested and twisted as he tried to stay true to what he thought was right. But I wasn't ever able to really invest in him.

Kes feels very mindless the whole time. At the beginning she is timid and distant. When she's with the griffins, it's as if she resists any thought more complex than "this feels good and right." At the end, she's lost her timidity, but become almost entirely mindless in a different way as the nature of fire magic changes her into someone else. Off-putting, like the griffins.

The most compelling part of the book is the griffin mage and Bertaud's dynamic, which seems like it came to an extremely abrupt climax and denouement.

The griffin mage from the beginning expresses that "my need was too great" to allow me to care about right, wrong, or hurting others. He will do literally anything to accomplish his goals, and won't spend a moment feeling bad about it, and he makes that very clear. When circumstances allow Bertaud to put the griffin mage in an extremely bad position and he justifies it the exact same way, it's very interesting. This is almost the one single moment in the book that a griffin is made to consider another perspective, and therefore we see growth, and I was certainly fascinated by how it turned out.

Overall, this is a story with a lot of originality and a gorgeously described setting and mythos. I was never bored, but also never hit the point of the book I always look forward to where my interest is hooked and investment starts to cascade. I think this just isn't the series for me.