The Spellsong War (The Spellsong Cycle, Book 2) - Softcover

L.E. Modesitt is best known for his long fantasy series beginning with The Magic of Recluce (1991), in which magical power works with the unforgiving balance and precision of physics. The Soprano Sorceress (1997) and its sequel The Spellsong War are similar in tone but use another magic system based on song. Thus singer-heroine Anna, summoned from Earth to the fantasyland of Erde, finds that her trained voice makes her the most powerful sorceress around. After wreaking much magical devastation in book one, she's now running the land of Defalk as Regent. Defalk is surrounded by scheming enemies, while its own vassal lords dislike being ruled by a woman. Modesitt's strength and weakness is that he imagines what follows in minute, realistic detail. It's good that, unlike some authors, he doesn't gloss over the hassles of tax-gathering in a feudal economy...but a little of this goes a long way. Anna deals with foe after foe in repeated, gruelling magical battles, each well visualised and each taking its toll of her health...but with a few too many roughly similar skirmishes in the book's 656 pages. One wonders, tongue in cheek, whether Modesitt deliberately conveys the exhaustion of war by half-exhausting his readers. Big, well-crafted and demanding. --David Langford