There are books that catch your eye by accident and make a lasting impression. Few have heard about them and even fewer have read, but this does not detract from the charm of the story and does not make the echo that it generated in the soul quieter.
Meanwhile, there is another situation. When a piece is sensational, everyone admires it. A year, two, three, ten years pass, and the people continue to remember this wonderful world, created by the author, its heroes, who struck to the very heart. Imbued with other people's thoughts, you open a novel and … nothing. You do not experience even a fraction of those experiences that you seem to have been promised. This is exactly what happened when, almost a quarter of a century after their publication, the works of Maria Semyonova from the cycle "Wolfhound", beloved by millions, fell into my hands.
Yes, it would be at least silly to argue with the fact that Maria Semyonova created a very detailed, thoughtful universe, which is largely based on scraps of real history, contains at its core modified cultural traditions and mythology of the peoples of the world. She wrote pages as if she were painting pictures, not forgetting about the little things that would certainly have escaped the attention of another author. She did not forget to learn the basics of combat so that the fights were naturalistic. I was not too lazy to dig deeper into the field of geology before sending the characters to the mines to extract stones. She got acquainted with the basics of human psychology, and therefore her characters are not just clichés, which would be typical for fantasy.
But, excuse me, this is still fantasy, and not an alternative story with superstitions revived. Therefore, the gods and goddesses wandering among people are, of course, wonderful. The concept of the many-worlds is not new, but always curious. The rudiments of magic are like that. But shouldn't there be more magic than sword duels and mythology reformed and reinterpreted? Doesn't it make sense to dilute the hero's quest travels with love branches, and not just friendship and endless moral and ethical dilemmas in the Dostoevsky style? Is it really necessary to turn Wolfhound into a superprincipled guy who lives exclusively in debt and has forgotten literally everything that does not make him better and does not elevate him spiritually? Do materialistic readers need this spiritual elevation, when they could, together with the hero, have their own home and a beautiful wife emerging from the raspberry-tree by the hand with a chubby baby?
If in the first two books the hero surprises a little, but in general the reader follows the quest without going into emotional details, since he is quite carried away by the events and still hopes for the best, then it becomes obvious that the works are missing something very important. which could be described by the metaphorical term "fairy tale". Mine life bonuses are too harsh and dry. A lot of details from the field of geology make the world more realistic, but they do not allow to dissolve in the plot, to really feel the pain of the heroes, to experience hopelessness with them, since the emotional component is truncated in comparison with the descriptive one. And in the fourth book in a row, it seems as if the author has written out. She repeats herself more and more often, puts many dots, and often refers to the works of her colleagues who worked in the same world. As a result, continuous riddles and omissions against the background of the same emotional dryness, fanatical striving for spiritual growth, complete asceticism in everything, grotesque adherence to principles and hyper-detail of the world. A number of lines appear to be incomplete. Others remain incomprehensible or simply illogical. And what began as a whole for health, as often happens, ended, if not for repose, then very sadly.
The bottom line? There is no desire to return to the world. I want something more feminine from a female author. There is an acute lack of love and magic in the blood, which should be immediately replenished. And in my head - a desire to recommend writers to take an example from Maria Semyonova in terms of the ability to think through the details of the world, but not follow in her footsteps when it comes to the lines of relationships between heroes and the creation of psychotypes that are so far from modern ideas about good and bad, that it is almost impossible to connect with the characters.
