Winds of Fate

Valdemar: The Mage Winds, Book 1

By: Mercedes Lackey

Narrated by: Karen White

Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

Winds of Fate is the first book in the Mage Winds Trilogy.

High Magic has been lost to Valdemar centuries ago when the last Herald-Mage gave his life to save the kingdom from destruction by dark sorceries. Yet now the realm is at risk again. And Elspeth, Herald and heir to the throne, must take up the challenge, abandoning her home to find a mentor who can awaken her untrained mage abilities. But others, too, are being caught up in a war against sorcerous evil.

The Tayledras scout Darkwind is the first to stumble across the menace creeping forth from the "Uncleansed Lands." And as sorcery begins to take its toll, Darkwind may be forced to call upon powers he has sworn never to use again if he and his people are to survive an enemy able to wreak greater devastation with spells of destruction than with swords....

©1991 Mercedes R. Lackey (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

The Reader needed to do research

This book is awesome - the story is awesome - the characters are great - it is Mercedes Lackey at her finest. My complaint is the reader - I understand that not every reader pronounces the ‘foreign’ words the same, but this reader really needed to do some research. There were words I had to look up in print to reconcile them with other readers’ pronunciation. But the Worst by far is the name of Elspeth’s Companion - who would pronounce ‘Gwema’ as Gw’ee’ma?? How do you get a long ‘e’ in that name?? To make me even sadder - I will purchase the next 2 books in the series knowing that I’m going to have to listen to this reader read about Gweema for many many more hours 😞

My Favorite since Middle School

I read this book in middle school and since then I've read it every few years because I feel in love with it. The audio book doesn't do it justice. The narrator is often choppy and makes many of the characters almost unbearable to listen to. If I hadn't read the book first on my own, I would probably hate this book because of the narration alone. The book is incredible and you want to see the characters have their happy endings. Excellent book, terrible narration.

changing the pronunciation of names?!?!

I wish that the narrator had been educated as to how to pronounce the names in the book they were very different from the other books that I bread with the same people. Calling Selanae Selena and Talia Taleeea and Cimri Kimree was so distracting. even worse was when this narrator alternated between the correct and incorrect pronunciations! It really was so distracting from the plot it was the first book in the series that I have not enjoyed the reading of

Another great tale by Mercedes Lackey

I had to speed up playback to 1.2 because the reader was too slow. Also, it was distracting and irritating every time she pronounced "merc" as "mere", which she did about 75% of the time. I enjoyed the story itself.

narration is irritating, story is great

I've read the book many times, and enjoyed the story again. the only negative I have is the way the narrator pronounces certain words - mainly names. it threw me out of the story every time. i don't know if she was trying to make the names sound more exotic or foreign or not, but it came across ridiculous. i wish she'd listened to 5 minutes of a previous audiobook so the names of key characters wasn't so jarringly different. that or the authors need to start telling the narrators how to pronounce names.
example:
Talia in previous was TALL-y-uh; here it's ta-LEE-uh
Gwenna in previous was GWEN-na; here it's gw-EEN-a

Very good book just needs a more careful reader

I have loved this series since I was in middle school (mid 90s). Hearing it read is thoroughly enjoyable. My only complaint (and the reason I don't give 5 stars all around) is the reader gets some words wrong. One that is constant is the word "merc" which she reads as "mere" which, if you don't know what it is supposed to be, messes up part of the story. Otherwise I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Great story

I always enjoy the books by Mercedes Lackey. Unfortunately the reader did not read the book before recording it or she would not have made mistakes. The book uses the word "mercs" but it was read as "meres". OCR document?

please read.

there is to many unneeded petty sexual scenes. knock it off and focus on the real story. also Karen white is far better then the other cry baby. she doesn't over do less then happy emotions.

Ok-could be shorter

First, this was my first Mercedes Lackey book, so i did not have nearly as many issues with the narrator as other reviewers did. I thought the narrator was actually quite good. She used sufficiently different voices that I usually knew who was talking, and her Like other reviewers have mentioned, her accents were sometimes uneven, fading in and out slightly with each sentence, but it was not so pronounced that it pulled me out of the story. And yes, she sometimes (but not always) pronounced "merc" as "mere," but it was probably a typo and the narrator probably isn't allowed to correct those.

Second, it *was* a bit confusing to jump into the Valdemar world with this book. All the recommendations i read suggested starting with the Arrows of the Queen series. Since all of the Arrows series is not available on Audible, I decided to start with this series, and it was clear from early on that I was missing out on a lot of back story that the reader was expected to know. However, it was still enough of a complete story on it's own to make it worth reading.

Third, I agree with other reviewers that this book would have been much better with some additional editing to cut down on the lengthy internal thoughts of the main characters. And that's coming from someone who overanalyzes everything and generally likes when characters work through things logically. In this case, especially in the first half of the book, there was so much internal monologing that was long, boring, and totally unnecessary to the story.

Overall, i don't think this was the best introduction to Lackey, but it was still a solid book. I loved the usage of magic, the connections with various intelligent animals, and the strong female characters (Kerowyn, Elspeth, and Need). There was too much focus on romantic interests for my tastes, but there was enough else to enjoy that I was able to look past the annoying budding romances.

I am going to try another Lackey book in the Valdemar series, but I don't think I am going to get the next book in this series, at least not right away. It left off in a comfortable enough place that I'm not dying to know what happens next. And, from the references in this book, I'm more interested in finding out more about what happened in the earlier Valdemar world.

One of my favorites by one of my favorites

I’ve loved the story for years now. I’m glad it’s been read by someone with such a wonderful voice. She makes each character unique