The War with the Mein: Book One of the Acacia Trilogy

It could be that being an older reader of Fantasy has made me far more judgmental of fiction than I was when I first started reading at the age of thirteen. At that tender age, just feeling the words across the page was enough to get my imagination running. Twenty-seven years of reading whatever Fantasy I can find has to make me at least somewhat knowledgeable about what makes good Fantasy fiction.I turn away from far too many Fantasy novels after only a few chapters. Good Fantasy is terribly difficult to find.Acacia is one of the good ones.In a word, it is Exquisite.Dense is another word I'd use. I mean nothing bad by using that word. By Dense I mean only that the book has some dialog but not as much as other books. A writer who can engage a reader with Dense writing is a very good writer. (Robert Jordan, anyone? He's one of the good ones and his books are as Dense as they come. But he's good at it. David Anthony Durham is also very good at it.)I could say so many things about Acacia. Most good, a few not so good. I have some particular language hang-ups that I find in just about every book I read. The word "that" is used far too often. Ninety percent of the time "that" can be removed and the sentence still sounds fine. I really hate the word "Perhaps" when "Maybe" works just fine. If I ever read a Fantasy novel where some sweating barbarian dude with a sword uses the word "Perhaps", I'm done. That book is dead to me, but thanks for trying! There were many times in Acacia where I would have put a comma. But these are little personal hang-ups and mean nothing when evaluating the story itself, which is by far the most important thing.Aside from my personal language hang-ups, Acacia is an incredibly satisfying Fantasy novel. To compare it to Robert Jordan, which is not my focus, I just want to point out that David Anthony Durham's Acacia is far more human to me than Robert Jordan's work. I love Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. And I love David Anthony Durham's Acacia too, for different reasons.The character Corinn is by far my favorite character. The weaving of her story within the book is incredibly interesting and satisfying. I liked all the characters, but Corinn is a diamond. She will always stand out for me. I look forward to reading more about her in The Other Lands.As I said earlier, David Anthony Durham's prose is exquisite without being too much in the way. Writers who spend more time attempting to weave pithy, poetic sentences are very likely to lose readers. Most readers want to disappear in the story and not constantly have attention drawn to the words. I think David did a splendid job of walking that very fine line. I highlighted several passages while reading Acacia on my Kindle and want to share two quotes here. First quote: "It was so achingly pathetic a transformation that Corinn reached out to him." Beautiful sentence around a beautifully written scene. Next quote: "He was spending too much time in the past, he knew. It was hard not to, especially on an evening like this when the air seemed hushed with melancholy." Here you see David dancing around the line between tugging a reader's heart or making a reader throw up. Writing exquisite prose is not easy, and David gets an A+ in my book. Acacia has just the right feeling of Poetry to make it beautiful.I think the best review I can give is that--as a reader--I never felt like David was insulting my intelligence. A good writer trusts the reader. A good writer lets the reader figure out stuff on his own. If a writer tells me what I already know, I'm very likely to put the book down and never pick it up again.I think Acacia will likely find more success with older readers, but it will also work for intelligent, patient younger readers. I know we have lots of very intelligent young readers out there, so give this one a try if you love great Fantasy. They don't come along very often.

I think I would have liked this book better, if I had not read the back cover first. The events described, which I thought started the book, instead took 100+ pages to get to. This made the first 100 pages seem painfully slow. Not a flaw of the book, but an expectations mismatch.The slow pacing of the book continued throughout, though. And it is slower than I think I would have liked anyway. It doesn't make it bad, this is just my preference. If you like that in a book, you may enjoy this one.This really reads much more like a historical novel, than a fantasy novel, fantasy aspects are pretty minimal. If you are looking for High Fantasy, this isn't it.The book is generally well written, populated with interesting characters. And the characters on different sides are all characters, not "good", and "evil". Everyone is going for their interests, or their idea of "right", it's not "good guys" vs. cardboard characters. Durham does this really well.There's a very large cast, and a fair amount of background. It gives the book a nice feeling of depth, and of being a view into a existing world. The depth makes the world feel much more real than many books, which sometimes feel as if their world ends one step past the events in the book.The one thing I really didn't like about the book was the combination of multiple points of view with cliff-hangers at the end of nearly every section. It made me feel like the author has been watching too much television, and didn't realize how poorly the cliff-hangers fit the structure of the novel. Every viewpoint change became an annoyance that threw me out of the narrative, instead of being an interesting shift to new events. This is the reason I won't bother with the other books in this series.If you like slow pacing (I suspect a ten volume set coming), and aren't bothered by cliffhangers, the author does a lot of the rest really well, and you might really enjoy the book.

The Acacian Empire conquered the "Known World" by brute force. The losers were enslaved and exiled. However, of all the people subjugated to the tyrannical rule the Mein, 22 generations after being vanquished never forgot and still loathe their conquerors.Hanish Mein begins his plot to not just overcome the Acacians, but to subject the proud empire under his rule as he believes King Leodan is weak for wanting to bring reform to Acacia especially wanting to end the selling of children into slavery and eventually all slavery. Hanish begins his revolt with assassination followed by his brutal army using biological weapons of mass destruction while invading Acacia and winning.Having feared his king will end the drugging of the oppressed practice which he believes will lead to rebellion and ultimately the end of the empire, Leodan's treasonous chancellor Thaddeus Clegg knows his error did what he hoped to avoid. Now he helps the monarch's four children escape. However, to his chagrin and everlasting regret, Thaddeus realizes the Mein regime is more oppressive than that of Leodan especially towards the Acacians. Trying to make up for what he helped cause, Thaddeus turns to the four offspring; the former heir to the throne Aliver, the elder daughter Corinn, the youngest female sister Mena, and the other brother Dariel in hope they will unite to free Acacia.This is terrific epic which contains a touch of fantasy, but reads more like an alternate historical thriller. Readers will believe that the Acacia Empire once existed and was overthrown by duplicity and biological warfare led by one of the oppressed people. The story line is action-packed and key players seem genuine, but the reason the audience will want to visit David Anthony Durham's world is Acacia and to a lesser degree its neighbors like Mein as these realms are so vividly described inside a superb political military thriller.Harriet Klausner

Anyone who loves serious fantasy has got to read the acacia trilogy.

I really liked the world of Acacia and the political structure built by Durham. The Acacian Empire is not benevolent although the people in it a highly likable... good book

Dieses Buch ist genau das, was man sich als Fan von "A Song of Ice and Fire" gewünscht hat: epische Fantasy, die sich nicht in seitenlangen, in Adjektiven ersaufenden Beschreibungen verläuft ("meine Fantasywelt ist so innovativ, dass ich unbedingt noch zwölf Absätze lang die Fauna dieses Landstrichs beschreiben muss), sondern von ihren originellen Charakteren und vor allem von der Story lebt.Durham, der seine Fähigkeiten bereits in früheren Romanen außerhalb des Fantasy-Genres bewiesen hat, überzeugt dabei mit flüssigem Stil und einer Erwachsenheit, die ihn meilenweit über dem Gros der modernen Fantasy-Schreiblinge thronen lässt, sie den Markt mit ihren ideenlosen (meist dreibändigen, auf mehr als 1500 Seiten aufgeblähten) Machwerken überschwemmen.Höchst empfehlenswert für jeden, der sich mal wieder eine anspruchsvolle Fantasy-Serie jenseits tumber Elfen-Ork-Geprügle gönnen will. Einzige Ausnahme: Wer GRR Martins "Game of Thrones" noch nicht gelesen hat, sollte unbedingt zuerst das Vorbild lesen, bei dem Durham zugegeben das eine oder andere Mal gespickt hat.

Great book good read would have been 5star if i hadnt read 'a song of ice and fire' before it.Otherwise a good read and I will def read the next Acacia book

great