Touchstone

I have to be upfront, from 50% to the end I simply skimmed to the end.

It's tough when you fall out of love with an author you have loved for so many years. Melanie Rawn was one of my heroes of the 90s. Her books had everything that I love about fantasy: political intrigue, interesting magic systems, cool world-building and a variety of interesting characters. I highly recommend the Dragon Prince and Dragon Star trilogies. And ugh, the quality of her Exiles books. She only wrote two books and then gave up on writing for a long time, and people who read them still mourn that she didn't continue.

I was so excited when she went back to writing. I just didn't expect...this.

Touchstone is the first book of her Glass Thorn series and has no world-building, characters that I don't give a damn about and feel like I never get to know them, maybe an interesting magic system, but I don't really know and...was there a plot? If so, I might have missed it.

Touchstone is a troupe of players who use magic to create plays. The four people in the troupe all have job descriptions like fettler, glisker, tregedour or something, and you never get any explanation whatsoever what they do. Cayden seems to be the main character, and for all that I know, he and the elfish glisker Mieka are in love. Cayden has prophetic dreams, and they involve some lady keen on Mieka and that's terrible, and that's pretty much everything that happens in this book.

There's also some kind of contest, and I am sure if there had been any exposition in this book at all I might even have cared about it.

The writing shows hints of former loveliness, but you know, I miss it when you held your breath during a Rawn book because there would inevitably be a moment of pandemonium that totally shook up the plot. There was a plot! How I miss these days.

I am not sure if I will be strong enough to pick up The Captal's Tower when it comes out if this is Melanie Rawn today. I mourn now.