The Secrets of Starpoint Mountain:

by Bill Albert

Since the last Dragon War the true history of Starpoint Mountain has been lost. So high that no one has ever reached its peak, or at least lived long enough to tell anyone, many theories and guesses have been made about its secrets. Soon, a young girl graduating from a hidden school will begin investigating rumors of a possible rebellion against the benevolent Giant Lords. She will fight skeleton warriors, befriend noble dwarves, and defend her life against the wicked aquilus elves as she follows a trail that will lead her from the forest to the northern ice fields and to the dark heart of the mountain itself. There she will face the truth about everything she believes in.

481 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Modrukinstealer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some good points and some bad points. Overall I thought it was a worth while read.

I liked that humans weren't the ruling/most important race in the book, Giants were. I also liked that the Giants weren't the ruling class through subjugation, they defeated the 'evil' dragons and have lead a more or less peaceful empire since. There are several other usually hated races as well like kobolds and hobgoblins that seem to get along fine with folks.

The Magic 'casting' seemed interesting but wasn't well enough defined for my tastes. There wasn't any effort to really define what it could or couldn't do. Humans aren't good at it, or at least not as good as Giants and the dragons before them. Though there is a group of apparently human "druids" it's unclear if they just have a similar appearance or are humans with druidic gifts. There is some kind of limitation of how often casting can be used in that they mention at times that they don't have any left. The effect for me is that the magic is mostly just available or not depending on whether it's convenient for the story rather than the limitations of the magic system causing hardship for the characters.

There are a few instances in the book where the words seem to be jumbled and it took me out of the story where I had to reread the sentence to pick up the proper meaning. I was able to get back in ok and I don't recall it happening in critical moments so it didn't bother me too much but I know others are bothered more by technical issues like that so I thought I'd mention it.


The main baddy is this ultra powerful, and supposedly extremely intelligent, person and yet in the end he chooses to take on 4 opponents by himself? With a polearm? He ends up summoning some beasts to help and gets away. It just seems for a guy who's supposed to be so smart, and such a powerful caster, that it doesn't make sense to be melee'ing at all much less against 4 opponents, why not just jump cast a bunch of elves and have them capture the 4, then he can walk in and evil guy monologue to Galif and offer to let her go to spread the word about how he'd won everything and how awesome he is? The other part is at the end it was him, who has already shown he's a match for Galif, with 6 orcs, and an acolyte of unknown casting ability but presumably powerful as he was one of Zaslow's right hand men and yet somehow Galif held off all 8 of these people? Not hardly the 4 orcs should've held her at bay, zaslow nuke her from orbit, throw corpse off balcony and been done with it. Or when Zaslow noticed his mountain was about to fall down on him why didn't he jump gate away with his crystal? When she took down the 6 orcs and an acolyte and it was just him why didn't he just jump cast a bunch of elves in? The obvious answer is that the heroine can't lose in the end so he couldn't. I don't know how to fix that but it seems like there should've been a better answer or a better explained reason why this hyper intelligent person acted the way he did. Maybe I just missed it... I guess the answer is just arrogance, he knew he was the greatest ever so he didn't believe he could ever lose despite ever more mounting evidence to the contrary. /shrug

Overall I did enjoy the book, just felt there is room for improvement. I see there is a second book in the sequel I'll probably check it out at some point when my To Read list thins out a bit more.