The Sea Hag eBook David Drake
Download As PDF : The Sea Hag eBook David Drake 
FROM PALACE . . . Dennis flees the crystal walls of Emath when he learns the truth behind the city his father rules.
TO WILDERNESS . . . The jungle enfolds him, tests his sword arm with monsters and his courage with nightmares more terrible than any monster.
FROM LOVE . . . Sword and spirit can win Dennis a princess--
TO BLACKEST WIZARDRY . . . But he can overcome the final evil only at the risk of all he has become--and his soul besides.
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The Sea Hag eBook David Drake
I've been reading books by Davis Drake since the mid '80s and he's always been one of my favorite authors so it was surprising how juvenile this book turned out to be. Was it an attempt to create a YA (young adult) series that appealed to teens? I know what kind of masterful writing he's capable of so I was stunned at how unsophisticated the story and characterization turned out to be. If you're a Drake fan it's best to give this one a pass.Product details
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The Sea Hag eBook David Drake Reviews
This adventure story has some exciting parts to it but no unifying theme. Stuff happens, then other stuff happens. Some of it is exciting stuff, some of it is boring; none of it is explained particularly well or welded to any kind of world-building backstory except for a weak attempt at 'it's all technology you just don't recognize' and 'they came from earth thousands of years ago'.
In that, it's more like a legend or a fable - not really unified or coherent but rather a series of independent episodes in which the hero is given his chance to prove his mettle. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but neither is it particularly compelling.
I feel like I had deja vu all over again reading this book. Mainly as I felt that Drake has more than likely read Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene from the late 16th century. Except the lessons learned are far older, by about 3,000 years. But the hero does not get as lost as Spenser's does in his work. Sea Hag also avoids all religion, quite the opposite of Spenser's direction.
I enjoyed reading this book. A nice hero is built, with fewer fatal flaws, and with workable character flaws. And it was a challenge to guess what parts of this world might be human derived and which is not.
Before his 16th birthday Dennis discovers his father promised to give his firstborn to the sea hag so he could become king. He has to do it when Dennis becomes 16. To solve the problem of his parents Dennis leaves the palace and starts a journey through the jungle accompanied by his best friend, Chester, a speaking robot.
With courage, honesty and a determination to do the right thing Dennis defeats many monsters and returns home to save the kingdom.
The pace of the story is a bit slow in the beginning, but it picks up once Dennis is in the jungle.
The robot is programmed with all kinds of proverbs, but also with knowledge about nature and society.
This is a coming of age story with a lot of fighting. Prince Dennis has found he is going to be sacrificed to the sea hag, so he leaves home on a potentially dangerous trip. Once he finds another human city, he finds that they are threatened by many dangerous things, but the people in the city just sacrifice to the threats just to avoid conflict. Dennis changes that and takes them on, learning skills and control of his emotions. He is changing from a child to an adult. The only thing that bothered me about this story that everything was magic It turned the story from science fiction to fantasy.
Although the story line begins rather slowly, it picks up both speed and complexity very nicely, to tell the tale of a young man, who initially has little future apparently as a prince of a strangely compromised land. Unknowingly, his father, the king had achieved his crown from an inimical monster's actions, whose price was the life of the new king's first-born son when he came of age. The young man discovers his father's predicament and tries to avoid the situation by leaving home without permission. The trials and tribulations of the young prince, with the help of a mechanical friend, slowly forces the youth to become a man. Not only does he become fully self sufficient, but he meets his life-mate (a proper princess, of course, of a neighboring kingdom), and ultimately solves his own kingdom's problem along the way. It was a good and satisfying "fantasy-opera" read - not terribly complicated, but good.
After tearing through the Slammer series and an assortment of David Drake's other books (Redliners, The Sunfire and such) I grabbed this one and started reading. It is a dramatic change from, not just the regular storyline, but the format. This book felt very choppy and I'm not sure why. The Slammers books feel a bit like a series of short stories depending on which part of the battle you're in and it works great for those books. This book felt like it was following the same series of short stories format but it's supposed to be one continuous plot line and it just didn't work. He accomplished the multiple story / one plot line fine with Redliners but the main difference is that in Sea Hag, he has one main protagonist and not a 'company' worth of people to spread the story out on. Sea Hag is not a bad book, each 'story' is very well told...they just don't flow very well.
I like David Drake (and indeed, consider myself a fan of his), but his works vary greatly in quality. You have some, like the Hammer's Slammers series, which are astoundingly good - visceral, gritty, riveting. You have others, like Northworld, which are interesting but predictable (once you twig onto what the background story is). And then you have some of his fantasy work, like the King of the Isles series - or the Sea Hag - which just fall flat. The characters are uninteresting, the dialog stilted and grating, and the entire process extremely frustrating.
Some of the other reviewers complain about the odd mixture of technology and fantasy - I found that to be interesting, and didn't mind the combination, or the fact that it's unexplained. Figuring out the background is left as an exercise to the reader, and I have no complaints.
What makes me dislike this book is the leaden dialog and word choice. We get a protagonist with no strong sense of personality, and description and storytelling which makes the world Drake's presenting to us seem mundane and dreary. I know Drake can do good fantasy - there's a short story of his about a Viking and a priest, I can't remember the name but it *sings* with tension and flows effectively. And when he's on his game, Drake really is an excellent writer. Unfortunately, the Sea Hag doesn't match up to the standard that is set by his other work.
I've been reading books by Davis Drake since the mid '80s and he's always been one of my favorite authors so it was surprising how juvenile this book turned out to be. Was it an attempt to create a YA (young adult) series that appealed to teens? I know what kind of masterful writing he's capable of so I was stunned at how unsophisticated the story and characterization turned out to be. If you're a Drake fan it's best to give this one a pass.
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