Sorceress of Darshiva, By David Eddings

After a somewhat fruitless trip to Ashaba, the ancient house of Torak, the company is again hard on the heels of Zandramas. But on top of trying to rescue Garion’s son, Belgarath must get his hands on a copy of the Ashabine oracles: even the one at Ashaba was corrupted and piecemeal. Both of these needs lead them to the Melcene islands, and seat of the ancient Melcene empire. (coincidentally which is very much like the British empire, only without their mistakes.) But even this trail will lead them to another trail, and Garion is getting very tired of chasing and being chased all over Mallorea. There is nothing else to do, however. Cyradis will not let either the child of the Dark, or the child of the Light arrive too soon at the Place Which is no More. And there is the small matter of Zakath to resolve…

Okay, at this point I’m getting just a little annoyed at Eddings for all this runaround. Not so much as it not being fun to read about, but trying to summarize and remember all the places they’ve been and are going to is really hard. It’s like he said, ‘I need another book. What new place can I send them to with some new task that they have to solve? And what new person will they meet there?’ Most of it really is quite pointless. Running here and there—gah! But strangely enough Eddings tries to provide his own answer to this question within the books themselves. If the prophecies they are following would state exactly where they needed to go and at what time, there would be such a crowd of people there that what needed to take place could never happen. Now, that’s a bit pat and convenient for Eddings. It gives him too much play room with his books, and let him add at least one or two that could have been shortened.

Can we say yay for Zakath, though? He’s really fun, even if he’s the second king that Garion’s given advice to, and brought out of his ‘life is terrible when you’re a king’ doldrums. (Eddings also pulled this in the Tamuli, but we won’t mention that because that’s another series). Even the witty repartee starts to pall after a while, because sometimes it seems like it repeats itself. And that is never good for witty repartee.

It’s not like this book isn’t any worse than the rest of the Mallorean, it’s just that it’s no better. And all the tricks that Eddings pulls is starting to get a bit old by this point. But the ending, oh, it is a wonderful ending. Quite a good ending. You should read it to get to the ending, because it is such fun. And for those of you who have read it, I hope you remember what I’m talking about. (small hint, it involves Durnik being special) That really won’t give anything away, but I hope it makes you want to read it. Evil me.