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Roger Zelazny's To Rule in Amber

In my review I assume people are familiar with Zelazny's original. If not, your loss - doubled. This is one of the most imaginative fantasy series and I will not hide spoilers from it.Thus from the original series we know that Dworkin created Pattern from which countless shadow worlds appear. Both Dworkin and his son Oberon were alive in the beginning of it, thus it is obvious they would survive at least this long. The previous two books explained why Dworkin had to create the Pattern and why Oberon was attuned to it to a high degree. The previous book ended with recreation of the Pattern. Here Oberon had to get used to the new shadow worlds. No only he did, but he also found a great shadow close to the Pattern with excellent terrain. He and his siblings hired architects, stonemasons, etc. from the nearby shadow and thus the kingdom of Amber was born. Oberon was a natural choice for the king. This book is mostly about Oberon's efforts to build his kingdom. He also has to sort out his uneasy relations with his siblings, dodge assassination attempts, find Chaos spies, and finally try to protect the Pattern (and thus all shadows) from machinations of Chaos. In other words, he did not have time to get bored. In my opinion this book is slightly weaker than the previous two. Oberon was mostly busy with administrative tasks and they are not exactly fun to read about. Luckily these tasks were always interrupted with sabotage, assassinations, and his siblings - some tried to help, some needed to be helped, and some just being against anything he was doing. Even though the book was weaker it provided a nice closure to the trilogy with Amber finally being built. While Dworkin did not have much screen time, some of his children were present and at least some of them were interesting by themselves. As far as characters go I would not call them excellent, but they were quite serviceable for the purposes of the story. So speaking about the whole trilogy, in my opinion it is worth reading for any Amber fan. Just do not expect the same quality as Zelazny's writing. I consider this as a story taking place in the world(s) Zelazny created. From this point of view the trilogy works just fine: it is entertaining fantasy, something I do not see often lately.
Picture of a book: Roger Zelazny's To Rule in Amber

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