Mistress of the Pearl
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Kundala is Miina's world, created by that Goddess with the help of the dragons. But Miina is missing, and her people have been enslaved by the alien V'ornn. Now a savior has come, the Dar Sala-at, a messiah promised by prophecy yet unlike anyone's expectations: within the body of a beautiful young woman is the mind and spirit of a unique Kundalan female who is joined in mystical partnership with the mind and spirit of Annon Ashera, a V'ornn male, the last survivor of a noble family. Together the two adolescents have matured and merged into a new joint identity. Now their common destiny, and Kundala's, is in their own hands.
In Lustbader's richly imagined saga The Pearl, magic and science clash on an epic scale. As in the Midkemia novels of Raymond Feist, the juxtaposition shows that neither is inherently good or evil. It is the people using magic or science who give them meaning, and Lustbader has created people you will never forget:
Riane, the Dar-Sala-at; Eleana, the woman she loves twice over; Kurgan, the V'ornn usurper who raped Eleana and sired her child; Marethyn Stogggul, Kurgan's defiant sister, an artist who joins the Kundalan resistance; Marethyn's lover, chief trader Sornnn SaTrryn, who secretly helps the resistance as well; and the fabulous Krystren, the Sarakkon woman from the mysterious southern continent, who comes north on a secret mission and will change the lives of everyone she meets. All the while, the evil Sauromicians threaten the world as they seek to use banestones to bind a dragon.
With each new volume, The Pearl has bloomed and ramified like a gorgeous flowering vine. The Mistress of the Pearl is the best yet, and those who have read the previous books will find new sources of excitement and enlightenment, but this is also a great place to begin catching up with the series, as the Pearl shines ever brighter.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of bestseller Lustbader will welcome the third hefty installment in his Pearl fantasy series (after 2002's The Veil of a Thousand Tears), with its wildly complex plot, breathless action and jaw-breaking nomenclature (Khagggun, Mesagggun, etc.), though newcomers might wish they had a roadmap. On the planet Kundala, the conquering V'ornn are having trouble subduing the natives, who have a champion in the woman Riane, aka "the Dar Sala-at, the fabled savior, destined to lead the Kundalan uprising against their alien V'ornn oppressors." Meanwhile, Annon, a dead V'ornn whose consciousness survives within Riane, shows that some V'ornn are worthy of the reader's sympathy. Riane's friend Eleana, who loved Annon, finds herself strangely attracted to Riane. The Kundalans' ultimate salvation, however, rests in securing the mystical Pearl. Tolkien's rings (reflected in the Pearl's "banestones") and the pseudo-Islamicism of Herbert's Dune are among the author's many obvious literary influences, while in a display of tongue-in-cheek humor three V'ornn admirals act a bit like the Three Stooges. Lustbader keeps scene-setting to a minimum ("Sapphire evening spread its wings over the great steppe") amid all the fighting and skullduggery. A surprise twist at the end serves as a springboard to a fourth volume.
