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good and evil villains by necessity good guys eve forward bad guys highly recommend local library favorite books love this book fantasy novels black knight fantasy genre threatens to destroy dark knight many times years ago well written plot twists decades ago right the wrong
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velveeta the cheeze queen
5.0 out of 5 stars love this book!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 19, 2023
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have loved this story since i was a child. so glad to have both audio and hard copies!
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent read, hard to put down
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 24, 2022
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Picked up this to have a light hearted read, but ended up immersed and enchanted. The characters are well written and the story drives forward in a way to keep you reading. In the end, it does give you something to ponder or you can just enjoy the adventure.
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Kage no Neko
4.0 out of 5 stars Still Enjoyable After All These Years
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 1, 2020
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I read this book originally as a borrowed paperback several decades ago. I enjoyed the book then enough to remember it constantly over the years and every so often tried to track down a copy, or better yet a republication. I am glad I now have a copy of my own.

Maybe it is nostalgia but I enjoyed reading the book again enough to want to give it 5 stars. Unfortunately I had to subtract a star due to various misspellings. It honestly seemed like they took an old copy and ran it through an optical character reader without doing any post editing/checking, I was constantly finding words like "tum" which by it's place in the sentence was supposed to be "turn". And it was not just one or two, but every 5 to 10 pages I seemed to run into one. Most I skimmed over and then my brain would stop and go, "wait, what?" A few were really egregious having non-alphabet characters in the middle of words.
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S 'n' E
5.0 out of 5 stars Villains vs Heroes ... Villains Win ... World is not Destroyed
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 3, 2018
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A grand adventure of a band of villains, for the sake of their own survival, see the Truth that you must have both Good AND Evil in the world. The "whitewashing" that has been going on since the Victory must not continue. A world without "bad" things happening is just as bad as a world without any "good" happening. For someone to win, another must lose. The seasons do not change as they used to. The animals and plants do not go on through their life cycles like they used to. The weak and ill do not die as they should. Nighttime is shorter. Vegetation runs amok. Too much prosperity. So They, our villains, of all people must be the saviors of this World. Before the World is destroyed by "too much of a good thing." Going on a Quest to find missing pieces of a key; to right the wrong of having evil removed from the world.

This is one of my very favorite books of old friends. In fact, I've had a hardcover and paperback copy of the book for years, and one week after its release, I have a Digital Copy. They offer an audiobook now too, and part of me wants to complete the collection, but I am not good at pure audio, I need to physically read a story to absorb it.
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EMAN_NEP
3.0 out of 5 stars BOTCHED BRILLIANCE
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 7, 2010
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What if the "Good Guys" were to win so decisively that the balance of all things would be "sublimated in a dazzling brilliance"?

Such is the question posed by Eve Forward, and it is one that has great potential. While most fantasy novels stop at "happily ever after" she takes it a step further and explains how a world of pure goodness would be just as bad as a world wracked by chaos.

Unfortunately, I found the rest of the novel to be woefully lacking. No sooner does one get hooked by the enticing premise than one discovers that the characters are sent on a 6-step Fetch Quest.
Blah.

The "Fetch Quest" sections of the book--which is most of it--are as boring as reading a ZELDA novel as opposed to actually playing the game. This is actually a good analogy, because as it turns out, Eve Forward actually used to write screenplays for a ZELDA TV show!

As if that isn't bad enough, just about every fantasy cliche you can think of is within the covers of this book. Dragons, the cute female interest, the knight in shining (black) armor, riddles in the dark, assorted caves, last second escapes and all the rest.

What a shame that the author thought outside of the box, only to resort to "in the box" cliches and tedium that we've all read before.

The characters were also hard to agree with. Out of all 6 of them, the only one that was terribly "evil" was Valerie, a shark-toothed sorceress with a cannibalistic past. The rest were more of a collection of misfits than anything else and seldom did anything really appalling.

In general the book comes across as a PG or maybe a PG-13, but with evil being the centerpiece of discussion I think some more "evil" events would allow one to take this novel more seriously. It's like a light-hearted Saturday morning cartoon trying to be simultaneously philosophical and entertaining on a dark subject.

On a more positive note, there is one clever, funny joke that is a word-play on "Assassin".
Also, the last few pages of the novel do wrap things up nicely and even the ending paragraph is very well written.

If the author had stayed away from the "Fantasy-By-The-Numbers" approach and kept her thinking outside of the box, this book could have been truly brilliant, a genre-defining novel. As is, this book is a mildly entertaining read, offering an interesting premise that deserved deeper exploration.
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Lyri
5.0 out of 5 stars Keep the battered hardcopy at home
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 29, 2018
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I first read this years ago when I was a preteen voraciously reading any fantasy novel in reach. I may have picked this one up because the cover art was by the same artist of several Xanth books? I don't remember. I just knew it had a classic but well fleshed out fantasy setting with an assassin with a heart of gold, a no-nonsense druid lady, a tiny snarky thief, an evil sorceress with a grudge, and a mysterious dark knight. The characters are fleshed out with vastly different backgrounds, and there's a few lovely plot twists that I really should have seen coming but didn't. The plot centers around balance in the world, and the light won a long time ago. Their quest is to undo what the last generation had accomplished and bring darkness back to the world before it's too late. I cant stress how much I love this book, it's a comfort read when I'm feeling low. I've replaced it a couple of times, and paid dearly for those secondhand copies. I'm so glad it's on Kindle now, I'll have this talisman with me wherever I go.
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Rae
5.0 out of 5 stars 20 years after my first read of it and I still loved it.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 17, 2022
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Not a grand masterpiece by any stretch…but a brilliant story well told. Just wish there was another!

. . .
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Good needs Evil and vice verse
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 22, 2022
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Loved the originality and characters. They stumbled so often through their journey, you never knew how they would get out of danger or how they could possibly succeed their quest. Also liked the cameo with nifty village
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T.N
3.0 out of 5 stars The author played it too safe
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on May 2, 2019
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For a time I was really intrigued by the idea of a villain being the main character of a story book and I searched the web for any sign of such a book. The moment that I read the title and the blurb I knew that I wanted this book, oh how naive and deluded I was.
Before I get started on this book I want to say that it didn't leave an impression on me. It was a bland brick and a total waste as far as I am concerned. And I mean it when I say brick I mean that if I saw this in a book store I would swear that it was a lethal weapon.

Plot: One hundred or so years ago the heroes of light successfully destroyed the forces of darkness in an epic fight known only as the final victory. They also unknowingly caused the end of the world. Why is the world ending? Because the author needed some plot device. Enter Sam and his thief friend who have to return bad things back to the world or it will... I didn't really get it but it seems that the world will be destroyed by bad fashion.
Basic find keys to open door quest. Each characters has their own profession task that they have to do.

Characters:
Listen. I could try to remember the names of these characters but let's face it, I couldn't care. This book was the size of a phone book and the author did try to give them personality, but they didn't stick out that well. They feel more like a check list and horrible cliches. So I will just list them by classes.
I also note that the author played it horribly safe with these characters. You turn this whole book around and replace bad with good, villain for hero, and it really wouldn't matter this. This is the same story told a thousand times. The villains aren't interesting. They don't have personalities they have check lists.

Assassin: The main protagonist in the story. After his guild goes belly up due to the good guys brainwashing the bad guys, he ends up on the run. The reason that he is on the run? He's a bad guy.

Thief: We all know he's a halfling but the author gave him a knock-off name. Basic kleptomaniac.

Druid: Last of her order. Her only character trait is that she is hot, she gives exposition, and she is a love interest for the hero. Of course they don't have any chemistry at all. She could just be one of those boxes that takes your order at a fast food restaurant and it wouldn't have changed the story.

Sorcerer: The Cannibal Drow. This is one of the most villain of the main characters, but instead of evil evil, she just comes off as a bit of a bitch.

Knight: You want to know what's sad? He has the most personality out of all of them and he doesn't talk.

The Centaur: Basic wimp.

What I like: The title and the blurb. That's it.
What I don't like: I just feel that the author had a good idea but played it too safe.
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Mourad Kamil
5.0 out of 5 stars villains by necessity
Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on April 3, 2010
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un livre que je cherche depuis pas mal de temps, que j'ai enfin pu acquérir et surtout en hardcover et pas un format poche. Un grand livre qui tord un peu le cou des poncifs de l'heroic fantasy. un livre que je recommande à tout ceux qui recherche une fantasy différente avec autre chose que le bien qui triomphe face au mal.
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