Celtic knot (Katherine Kerr in general)

Member Name: savil1

Product:	Katherine Kerr in general
Date:	26/02/02 (97 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Unique style, good use of language, not addicted to long words for the sake of it

Disadvantages: somewhat complex timeline, celtic based names hard to ronounce

Katharine Kerr has a unique writing style, especially in her Deverry series. She writes both science fiction and fantasy but is best known for her fantasy series set in the world of Deverry. These books are written in a timeline that she describes as being like a celtic knot. The books are about a number of characters the main ones being Nevyn, Jill and Rhodry. The book looks at the lifes of the characters through a series of interlinked stories across different times. The characters are with the exception of Nevyn reincarnated to appear in the different timeperiods not merely extremely long lived.
The best part of her writing style is the way in which she makes the stories in each of the times exciting and unique, whilst never loosing track of the overall storyline. Uniquely amongst the fantasy books I've read she moves around times without feeling obliged to follow any chronological order and without loosing her readers.
There are 3 quartets in the Deverry series, the D*spell quartet, the Time of * and the final series which is named for magical beasts Black Raven, Red Wyvern and the Fire Dragon are all available now and the Golden Falcon is due out soon and concludes the story wrapping up all the loose ends bar one. The final loose end about what happens to Hean Marn is in a yet to be written book that should be pretty independent of the rest.

For those people who like science fiction the Polar City books (Polar City Blues and Polar City Nightmare) are also well worth reading but have a standard timeline. Also worth a mention are Freezeframe and Palace.

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