In October, I started reading The Tempering of Men. I had a hard time getting past the first page and realized that it reminded me of something. I asked Daniel if it reminded him of anything. He read the first page and picked up on it immediately, saying "Oh my God! It's the Shadow War of the Night Dragons The names! The names!" I was a bit teasy about it on twitter and should probably apologize because...
In the end, I pushed through the first few pages, got drawn into the rest, and found I could really enjoy it. (Although, as Daniel says, it is sort of like gay werewolf porn.) It has lots of good stuff, but was very confusing at first because it assumed you'd already know which are the people, which are the wolves, what their genders are, and that there's going to be a lot of gay sex -- none of which you might reasonably be expected to know when you first pick the book up from the shelf.
Recently, I got around to reading the first book: A Companion to Wolves. It too has a strong element of gay werewolf porn, but was much better at the beginning of drawing the reader into the narrative. On page 62, though, is this wonderful paragraph, which is definitely one of my favorite paragraphs ever:
Although Isolfr knew it was stupid, he was hurt by Glaedir's eagerness. Glaedir's brother Eyjolfr was Randulfr's lover, Glaedir one of the sires of Ingrun's litter, and it seemed wrong that he and Glaedir should move against Grimolfr and Skald, when neither Randulfr nor Ingrun would dream of doing such a thing.
The names! The names! :-)
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
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