The Bone House (Bright Empires, #2)

by Stephen R Lawhead

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

Fine more reviews like this on The Literary Phoenix.

Thanks to Mina, Kip and Giles narrowly escape death.

They leave their benefactors behind and race against time (or towards it?) to outwit the Burleymen chasing them.  Mina, fortunately, has a plan.  Actually, Mina seems to really have it all together when it comes to this ley travel business, something Kip himself cannot claim.  Down to three, they continue their search for the pieces of the skin map, hoping to find them all before the nefarious Burley.

Meanwhile, in other timelines, we learn a bit more about Burley's unfortunate past and about Arthur Flinders Petrie, the man who wear the skin map himself.  We travel from Egypt to the Stone Age to Victorian England and all back again, settling at home in Mina's imperial cafe.

I'm torn between fascination and boredom.

The ideas and the story are excellent, but because of the manner of the magical system in this book (the ley lines), Lawhead likes to jump all over the place with his narrative.  We'll hear from Mina in the present and the past (and honest to goodness - she's the only one who has any idea what's going on), and we'll hear from Kit in the present then on to Burley in the far past, then forward a little to Arthur and man this is one of those books you really need to focus on or you'll get lost.

I really, really, really love the ley travel concept, and I adore the historic worlds we fall into.  But there's a lot of explaining and re-explaining and there are times when I'm just done with it all and WHOOSH! into something really interesting and okay I'll hang around a bit.

The characters are a bit flat?

Each character has a rich and detailed history, but despite that they fall into the same monotone humdrum.  This may fall to the narrator, who did not excel at differing voices.  He was very easy to listen to, but I really had to listen to the qualifiers - okay, "Kit said," this is Kit.  The characters fall into bowls where they can be summed up in one trait: Mina - intelligent, Kit - naive, Giles - frightened, Burley - grumpy.  And so forth.  It just wasn't very exciting.

Oh the other hand, we do have very interesting side characters at the various stops in history.  The culture and setting are all shown extraordinarily well, so those can draw you in where other aspects may not.

I'm a glutton for punishment I guess so I'll grab book three.

I'm so torn between disliking the storytelling style and being SO, SO INTERESTED in the concept.  I don't care so much about the skin map as I do about learning the ley system.  Lawhead has put an incredible amount of research into this series - both historically and theoretically - and you can tell from the knowledge that seeps through the pages.  I am fascinated, really I am!  I just don't think that writing-wise, this is his strongest work.  I found the King Raven trilogy a lot easier to swallow.

I hesitantly recommend this series - definitely starting with The Skin Map... this one is book two! - but with the precaution that you need to have patience and a deep interest in either history or time travel to really enjoy them.  As it happens, I love both!