Wit'ch Gate by James Clemens

Wit'ch Gate is the fourth book in The Banned and the Banished series, and contines the tale of Elena, a young woman in control of powerful magic. I'd rather not go into too much detail about the plot itself as it is part of a longer story, but the general idea is that there is a quest to destroy the sources of magic of the heroes' enemy, the evil Dark Lord.

There is no recap at the start of this book. I have read the previous three books in this series, but it was not recently, and I was a bit lost at the start. The plot does fit mostly into this book, but there is a reasonable amount of reference to the previous books and it's probably best to read this as part of the whole series.

The story itself is not hugely innovative - it's a fairly typical tale of a series of journeys in which people save the world and in the process discover themselves - but it did hold my attention. One feature is that this volume is divided into a number of separate books, and as the characters split into smaller groups, each book tells the story of one of the groups. While earlier on I did find the lack of progress on the other plots fustrating, ultimately this greatly helped keep continuity which can get lost in a longer story (and this is a long book!). I also found that the action was well paced, with not a huge amount of pointless waffle; it'd be hard to cut much out of the book without losing out on plot or character development.

And on that note, character development (and world development, for that matter) is a well implemented feature of this book, and indeed this series. I particularly like the fact that the characters are not perfect idols, with jealousy, anger, love, despair and secrets all playing a useful role in the plot. Indeed, I am quite looking forward to read the final book in the series to see what happens to some of the characters, in particular Mogweed, Fardale and Joach. In the same vein, in one part of the book I really started to dislike some of the characters - and that to me is a good sign that there's at least something to dislike.

There is one annoyance that I particularly noticed: the constant use of apostrophes in the middle of words. Wit'ch, el'vin, d'warf, ebon'stone - they are all perfectly good words without the bizarre punctuation and the apostrophe just makes me annoyed. I can understand it to a small extent, but it really began to irritate me when every other word seems to have one. It's not a major problem, but to me it seems gimmicky.

But this is a fairly decent middle volume of a series, and the series itself is quite an interesting series. It's not a truly special book, but it held my attention well enough and if you like fantasy you'll have no problem with it.

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