Oathbound, by Mercedes Lackey

Mercedes Lackey has been one of my favorites since around high school. I feel as if I know Kethry really well since reading her in By the Sword more than a few years ago. However, both the author's writing style and I must have changed considerably, because Kethry is not nearly as tough as I remember. Then again, I may be just viewing her in a contrasting light against Tarma, who seems to be by definition as tough as door nails and paired with a harsh countenance for its sake, too.

The story starts out slow. The way it stays slow throughout the first half of the book disappointed me because I wanted something action oriented and plot driven, but the book ended up being something of a fable about the nature of a relationship and all the intricacies of care two people must bring into it. A little voice inside me tells me that I should relate more to this, having been in relationship after relationship - all of them long and serious - but the two characters are in essence trying to start a family and build a business, and I'm just not there yet.

Thankfully, though, there were moments when I still really enjoyed the book. I thought everything was really starting when the two women entered into a part of the forest after the Plains out of curiosity, and there was a sort of Wonderland-like setting where nature was so much alive that the plants can think and move. The arrival of the kyree Warrl - it's such a funny name, like a childlike noise, Warrl - was really what began the book for me. I was interested in why the giant wolf-cat shied away from the spelled sword Need, but oh well.

Tarma's return to her Plains clans and Kethry's meeting them there spoke a little about bringing home an Outclan - fantasy speak for interracial - mate that matches reality in a fairly awkward and sad way, which is how these things usually play out. The pressure that Tarma faced in regards to having to have children to form a clan, despite the clans' own rules about being Sword Sworn and having to wreak vengeance on the destroyers of a clan, seem unduly harsh. I thought of it as a statement on the potential hypocrisies of traditional values.

When they left the Plains, the story line became kind of episodic, because they would go and solve cases according to where the spelled sword Need took them, which is usually to the aid of some woman. And again, I felt like there were many lulls, and the real plot only began with first the banishing of Thalkarsh the demon, and later again with the exiling of the bandit Longknife.

Here I wondered why the evil and suffering that the demon fed on must include sex, though it was probably because he took over people's minds and made them entertain him against their will. Still, the association gave sex a bad rep, and the author knew that the imagery for the villains was kind of cliched, but used the icons of cult practice and demon worship anyway. (Did anyone call the partying, orgies and revelry of Bacchus, the god of wine and debauchery, a cult practice? It's all perspective. Of course, nowadays, anything that takes too much money away from its practitioners is considered a cult.)

The twist here is that two major villains came back to get at our protagonists, and that Need is essentially a sexist sword, because it became powerless when Thalkarsh turned Landknife into a woman. When he was made into a woman against his will, he thought it was killing him because his identity was vanishing, but in my opinion, it was really just the dominance and privilege he missed, because that was what he associated with masculinity. It's his weak mind when it came to resisting base bodily pleasures that was mainly his undoing. Being small seems to be the one attribute that the villains kept imposing upon the two women, so that they were too weak to fight. Is this a commentary on modern media standards of attractiveness? Meanwhile, Thalkarsh thrives on the shock value of his deeds, which was why he was nonplussed when the orgies and decoration had no effect on the little priest when he came to talk to him.

When it came down to it, I felt like the plot had a lot of build up for a kind of sketchy and hurried resolution. It just seemed like the protagonists were lucky that Tarma was a friend to this Nemor, arch priest of the Anathei. He was a twist himself, because I thought that he would be a minor character given that at first he was not named. He also serves as a kind of father figure to the two women, especially when he calls them "child". The idea was that the priest somehow used the energy released when Warrl attacked Kethry to switch everyone back, and also to imprison Thalkarsh in Lastel's body. The image of Lastel herself is another stereotype: pampered, weak, blond and attractive.

There are many more subjects touched upon when readers stop to think about what the icons, actions and twists of the story meant. I feel that its message in terms of feminism is kind of vague and contradictory, but maybe that's because I feel so strongly about it that I'm a purist. By itself however, without an analytical mind, it's just a tale that has a slow start with some good buildup, that comes to abrupt finish. In my opinion, this book was not the best that Mercedes Lackey has to offer.