Gryphon in Light by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon

I have loved Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books for thirty years. As I said in my review of her last Valdemar book, I still have the SFBC omnibus of the Last Herald Mage trilogy on my shelf and I can’t tell you how many times I read it. 

Until recently, I haven’t read many of her Valdemar books in the last few years. I listened to the audiobooks of the Collegium Chronicles series, which was fun, but I felt it dragged on too long, with too many kidnappings, and Mags’s accent drove me bananas. I lost touch with the series when my library stopped buying the ebooks of the Herald Spy series after Closer to Home, and I was disappointed in Spy, Spy Again, the third volume in the series focusing on Mags’s kids. 

Two years ago, I really enjoyed Beyond, her new novel about the origins of the kingdom of Valdemar. I also enjoyed the sequel, Into the West, although it was a weird book and the pacing felt off.

But what I have been wanted for decades now is a continuation of the main timeline. We see Elsepth grow from the brat in the Arrows trilogy into a strong, powerful young woman during the Mage Storms.  But what happens next? Well, here is the beginning of a new trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon to tell you.  

Larry Dixon is Mercedes Lackey's husband and sometimes co-writer on Valdemar books, specifically the Owlknight trilogy and the Mage Wars etiology focusing on the gryphons.  As I kid, I really dreaded reading the books co-written by Mr. Dixon.  I felt that they were not as well written as Ms. Lackey's solo Valdemar novels.  So I had some trepidation going in to this book, an eARC of which I got from DAW and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.  

My fear was not completely unfounded here, but neither was my eager anticipation.  This book did continue the story! Finally!! We see Elspeth again, if briefly! We are told what is going on in Valdemar, politically speaking, and it seems like some “Make Valdemar Great Again” types are causing all sorts of troubles.  Writing style-wise, this book did not seem markedly worse than the last few solo Valdemar books I have read.

But oh is this book a sloooooooooow slog! It takes forever for anything to happen! We get a lot of internal navel gazing of the main human and gryphon protagonists with a lot of telling, not showing, of their characters.  The human is a little too perfect, which is saying something in a series about white clad heroes on white horses, and the gryphon is a little too stupid and selfish for me to deal with at times.  But my main gripe is that we get like 50 pages worth of plot spread out over the whole book, and all of it seems to be prologue for the sequel when the real story begins.  A book needs to stand on its own, not just be setup for the next book, and this book falls down there.  

But I did enjoy it, and I am excited to see where the story goes from here.  Totally recommended for completists,  not a great place to start the series.