Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsEh, not terrible, but not great
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 23, 2012
I just finished C.S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy, and was blown away. I haven't read such a good series in a long time. I thought I'd become too jaded or that my expectations were too high and I wasn't able to enjoy a series as much as I used to, but the Coldfire trilogy proved me wrrong, and I was happy to be wrong. So I went looking for other books by C.S. Friedman, and saw In Conquest Born had high reviews. Maybe my expectations were once again too high after the Coldfire trilogy, but I found this story sorely lacking in many ways.
The characters - I cared absolutely nothing for any of them. It wasn't so much that they were detestable. The Hunter from the COldfire trilogy certainly wasn't a good person, but he had some redeeming qualities that made him a facinating character even though I didn't always LIKE him. The characters in In Conquest Born are flat, without complexity, and have no redeeming quality, I feel, and were therefore of no interest. In addition, I never felt like I really got to know them, never felt like I was experiencing through their eyes. I felt like I was "told" things about these characters rather than "shown". Also, much of the beginning of the book was told through letters, communications both calls and telepathically, which is a very detacted way to introduce characters, and was used as a rather obvious vehical to deliver pages and pages of cultural and political explinations, which got really old and annoying for me after a few pages.
The plot was also rather obvious and simple, and very predictable I found. I found myself putting the audiobook on "fast" spead to get through the slow, tedious parts and to something interesting. Some plot developments were a bit of a stretch, a few times out of character for the characers and while the author tried hard to justify such developments and make them plausible, it seems to me is comes across as "trying too hard" on the part of the author, which I thought made it more obvious how unlikely such developments were. I felt like these plot developments were forced contrary to character's and natural plot flow to make the story go in a certain direction. Nothing wrong with that, but if it doesn't make sense, it really is jarring to me.
I really enjoyed the lengthy descriptions in the Coldfire trilogy, of unusual characters and a facinating world. But in In Conquest Born, I found the same lengthy descriptions unnecessary and uniteresting, usually giving way too much detail to rather mundane settings and people. The two worlds and cultures seemed like stereotypical opposites with few truly unique aspects. However, i didn't find them wholely uninteresting either. I found the telepathic evolution and human evolution in general an interesting topic but neither was ever really flushed out. The whole book felt like a scale with the few shining interesting bits canceled out by equally boring, uninteresting bits.
Overall, I did not find In Conquest Born a terrible read, it was worth listening too, and I'm not disappointed that I spent a credit on Audible on it, but it wasn't great. I was bored much of the story. I didn't think it worth 5 stars. I'd give it 2.5 stars if I could, because I am exactly in the middle in my regard for this book.