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Fantasy. Fiction. HTML:Wanting to puzzle out the mysteries of her past, an orphaned elf embarks on a quest for answers??a journey made all the more dangerous by the harsh world around her
 
Mirrodin is a world beyond imagination. Forests of metal claw the sky. Razor-sharp metallic grasses stretch across the plains. Vast oceans of quicksilver conceal predators awaiting the unwary.
 
In the metal jungle of the Tangle lives an orphaned elf named Glissa. A reverse amnesiac, she is plagued by strange, indecipherable visions??an affliction she shares with her fellow elves, who have dubbed the phenomenon ??Flares.? Accompanied only by these glimpses of a foreign elf's life, Glissa sets out across the harsh landscape, seeking the secrets of her past and daring the perils of her present. And she must tear aside the veil that hides the face of a hidden enemy whose power extends across a
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The Moons of Mirrodin is the worst non-Twilight book I’ve ever read. It is a literary war-crime. In two thousand years, messiahs will read The Moons of Mirrodin to absolve us of our sins. Its difficult to logically list the flaws of the novel due to the emotional trauma, so I will try to go in chronological order. You must suffer as I suffered to truly understand.

The book opens with Karn and Jeska, a newborn planeswalker, leaving Karn’s artificial plane of Argentum as he shows her the tools of the trade. To monitor and safeguard the world, Karn leaves behind a sentient golem named the Warden. The Warden, Memnarch, immediately starts to talk to himself about things he already knows while he is alone in a room. This is the graceful and subtle exposition to expect from Moons of Mirrodin. Within moments, Memnarch names Karn’s world after himself: Mirrodin. Apparently the “M” was sufficient resemblance. He also is somehow exposed to Phyrexian glistening oil, which he does not recognize despite being a creation of a weapon designed to fight Phyrexia and being left to safeguard the plane from invaders such as Phyrexians. He is corrupted by it by page 4. Yes, there will be spoilers in this review. No I didn’t warn you. I want to spoil this for you. We are also treated to the following: “The stars were not randomly distributed according to some formula. They were random, as were their movements.” Apparently one of the side-effects of Phyrexian influence is the sudden ability to spit out paradoxical astrology koans.

We then jump to the actual main character of the story, Glissa, a female elf warrior living in the metal jungle called the Tangle. She is a reverse amnesiac; she remembers things from the life of an elf not native to Mirrodin. These flashes are not limited to Glissa, but are a phenomenon common to elves, and called Flares. This is where the novel makes a weak and bumbling attempt to make a fantasy swear word. “Flare this.” “What in the Flare.” Its clunky. Its unnatural. It lacks the charm and believability of successful faux swear words like BSG’s “frak.”

The other thing to know about Glissa is that she is the blandest, boringest character in the history of the written language. She has no personality. Now, neither does her sister, Lyese or her ‘love interest’ Kane, but they aren’t being treated like they are awesome, inspirational, relatable heroes. Glissa is dumb as a stillborn deer, and this is on a world where trolls and goblins are the smartest races. Her romance is as sterile as the interior of an autoclave and rife with the teenage bullshit of “I like this dude but I could never tell him or show him I love him.” I believe this is because it is how that McDermott tells stories in general, without the ability to describe or show properly. Its how we roll in the Tangle. We meet a troll that says he hates metal and avoids it whenever possible by having bone furniture. He lives in a metal tree. Actually, when 50% or more of the world is made of metal, including your own body, would you even recognize it as a ‘foreign’ material? Do the trolls suffer from some type of body dysmorphic disorder?

After some Flare discussion and making some vague threats at the trolls, Glissa shows that she understands about planeswalkers, something her people have never encountered, but doesn't know basic traditional rituals for her own people. We are spared from more awkward dialogue and clunky exposition when a glut of levelers, giant behemoth machines made of blades, come to ravage the Tangle and kill all within. We get a Drizzt-like display of warrior prowess on the part of Glissa, which ultimately ends up doing nothing as all her friends and family die. She then falls unconscious with her leg stuck in a leveler's mouth and is dragged away as they leave the scene of the crime. Somehow being dragged by a machine made of blades over shards of broken metal trees doesn’t harm her, and the leveler doesn’t notice an elf stuck in its mouth like an errant piece of popcorn kernel trapped in its gums.

Glissa wakes up in a semi-mountainous region with a strange autistic goblin named Slobad. Slobad has this verbal tic, huh? Where every sentence ends with huh, huh? And there is a question mark at the end, so you kind of imagine him talking with that upraised inflection like a stereotypical blonde bimbo, huh? It’s a lazy and annoying verbal tic that McDermott uses instead of giving the goblin his own voice, and is only marginally better than ‘Flare.’ Because Slobad has nothing better to do in his life, he decides to drop everything to escort a crazy, violent, reverse amnesiac elf around. They decide the best course of action is to pester the metal lion-warrior people who live in fields made of razor grass. Because this is a Magic: the Gathering novel and they need to give each color screen time and if they don’t walk it out for readers we won’t ‘get it.’

Glissa breaks a door down and kills the Raksha’s girlfriend. The Raksha is the leader of all the leonin and is nigh-legendary among them, but killing his mate has absolutely no repercussions. Glissa’s leg is patched up from the leveler attack and they fly her to the next color area for her. Good thing the Raksha’s relationship was as empty and void of emotion as Glissa’s, or there may have been some actual conflict. In the swamp, called the Dross, they find an ancient golem in the muck, which Slobad fixes. It is a regular-type amnesiac. They encounter a nim, which is a zombie, and Glissa kills it. Its human master literally sobs over it like the rancor handler and they promise to tell his master it isn’t his fault. Don’t you hate it when an uppity overly-violent elf kills your pet and puts you in mortal danger? They diligently see Geth and promptly threaten him with death, then leave. Because there is no way that Geth won’t punish his underling for causing all this trouble the second they turn their back. But, hey, violence solves all problems, girls!

They go back to the Tangle after getting more information from the leonin and looking at some volcanoes. They arrive just in time to watch Kane and the trolls get finished off. Which is awesome, because I could not handle the constant non-existent sexual tension and connection they were developing between Glissa and Kane. Too intense, man. Just as with her family, Glissa doesn’t spend any time reacting or mourning to this. They track down a Vedalken mage, a four-armed dude with blue skin who wears robes and had shady dealings with Geth. Rather than capture him, Glissa kills him and cuts off his fingers to use as keys to enter the mystical Seat of the Synod. She wears the fingers like a necklace, a la Daryl from Walking Dead. Remember, she is the good guy and you will like her.

They take a detour on their journey to return to the mountains, Glissa having not killed a sufficient quota of Slobad’s race yet. They leave and decide to seek out the Seat of the Synod by traveling in a submarine in a literal ocean of quicksilver. Yes. An ocean. Of fucking mercury. (Why not a boat? A ship? A Flaring hot air balloon? Of all the possible vehicles, the one that is the least fantasy-genre appropriate is a stupid submarine.) Because Glissa is dumb and violent and incompetent, disaster shortly ensues and Glissa drowns in mercury. She drowns in mercury, but don’t worry guys, she’s totally fine. Walk it off, soldier.

They pick up a wind mage out of pity and continue on. They notice they are being followed by ornithopters totally not ornithopters original characters DO NOT STEAL called aerophins. That is, when they are not called aerophius. Even McDermott doesn’t know what these things are and he invented them. It’s a nice change of pace from the other gratuitous spelling and punctuation errors, though.

They break into the Synod. Glissa kills and somehow, miraculously, out-wits the wizards, despite the wizards having decades of magical study, giant brains, and a huge supply of a substance called Serum. This is my favorite part of the book. Serum is collected from animals native to Mirrodin and nowhere else. It is used by the elite ruling caste of Mirrodin, who live in the only ocean environment of the plane. Serum is highly addictive, and drinking it imbues the user with visions, knowledge, and power, but slowly and irreversibly mutates them. If you are thinking, “But Kaitlynn, this is a total and complete rip-off of Dune, how can it be your favorite part?”, you are right. And that is why it is my favorite part: it distracted me for a moment by reminding me of a better book.

Ugh, Flare me sideways, there’s still more of this dreck to slog through. Glissa melts some Vedalkan named Janus and another Vedalkan takes her hostage. He lets them escape though, pretty chill dude. They descend into the world, which happens to be hollow. They catch a glimpse of Memnarch, sip some Serum, and Glissa, in a culmination of elvish grace and fortitude, vomits on her goblin. Some nonsense cliffhanger occurs with the golem regaining his memory from the Serum, but that is really the last scene: Glissa puking. It was apropos, however. I felt like puking, too. It was the first time I connected with the character.

TL;DR: This book is terrible. The plot meanders aimlessly. Character’s personalities are bland, empty, and interchangeable to the point where I could read a line of description or dialogue and you wouldn’t be able to tell me who said it. (Except for Slobad, huh?) Glissa in particular is a mentally-deficient Drizzt wannabe with a echolalic goblin instead of a cat. The book is populated with errors and typos more densely than New York is with rats and food trucks; I tried to highlight them all before I sent the book back to the publisher and 3 markers died in the attempt. Every problem is solved with violence. Every. One. I’m stunned that Glissa didn’t try to woo Kane via defenestration and maiming. She is monstrous, and I found myself rooting for the bad guys to take out the psychotic elf-beast.

Final verdict: If you find yourself around this book, do not panic. Do not read it, for it is the shatterer of minds. Just lay the book on the floor, curl up into a ball, and wait to die.
( )
  kaitlynn_g | Dec 13, 2020 |
Like any Magic book, most people will read this to see the card game come to life. The Mirrodin block had mixed reviews, some liking the new take on Magic and some hating the science fiction theme. So how does the book hold up? Well, like usual, it's always alot of fun to read about the game many of us play. Slobad and Glissa are interesting enough, and anyone who has been killed by a giant wad of flying metal spat out by Bosh will appreciate how powerful his character is in the book. The villains are also quite terrifying, and probably one of my favorite aspects of the book.

The problem arises when you realize how forced the plot is. It is clear that the author was instructed to visit a location for each of the 5 colors. Throughout the whole book, the characters are trekking through each color, and after you get passed the 3rd you start realizing how unnatural it feels. I appreciate the effort. It was very interesting to read about the Leonine and the Nim, but they really had nothing to do with the actual storyline. It's not only a problem with the Mirrodin book, but all the books in the cycle. In each book the authors manage to force the character into each location.

So it is a bit complicated. The fans will be glad to see each color represented in the book, while your average book reader won't understand why much of it wasn't edited out. If you play the card game and read all the books, this review won't sway you either way, you're probably going to read it regardless. To anyone else though, I'd recommend staying away from this cycle. ( )
1 vota Ape | Jan 14, 2009 |
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Fantasy. Fiction. HTML:Wanting to puzzle out the mysteries of her past, an orphaned elf embarks on a quest for answers??a journey made all the more dangerous by the harsh world around her
 
Mirrodin is a world beyond imagination. Forests of metal claw the sky. Razor-sharp metallic grasses stretch across the plains. Vast oceans of quicksilver conceal predators awaiting the unwary.
 
In the metal jungle of the Tangle lives an orphaned elf named Glissa. A reverse amnesiac, she is plagued by strange, indecipherable visions??an affliction she shares with her fellow elves, who have dubbed the phenomenon ??Flares.? Accompanied only by these glimpses of a foreign elf's life, Glissa sets out across the harsh landscape, seeking the secrets of her past and daring the perils of her present. And she must tear aside the veil that hides the face of a hidden enemy whose power extends across a

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