This book is again a bit better than its predecessors. What I feared at the end of book 3 did not happen: after the main characters get split up, there is no repetition with each member encountering the same thing. Instead, they manage to find each other again relatively quickly and get help from other people. They handle themselves relatively well, and manage to find out a lot more about what a blending can do. The blending is definitely one of the pros of the series: the magic itself is really cool, and the blending even more. One of the cons of this book is (again) the annoying misunderstandings between the characters. In this book, at least it's only between Tamrissa en Vallant and not between the others, but it's still quite irritating. ( )

(Alistair) I got home yesterday from the airport pretty footsore, and wanted a book to read in the bath, and had already taken my stack of in-progress books downstairs. And so, gentle reader, that's why I'm reading Betrayals pretty much right after Challenges, and not later on.

Anyway, now the series - despite the slow start that I lamented back in the entries of the first two books - is really picking up, and in order to express my thoughts more fully, I shall indulge in spoilers, so be warned.

When we left our protagonists, they'd been drugged, sedated, and shipped off to an assortment of nasty fates. Herewith an assortment of random thoughts:

* Damn, but the "nobility" in this universe are depraved. And when I say depraved, I don't mean "somewhat unconventional in their tastes, but nothing that would shock a resident of Berkeley", I mean, "make Caligula, Caracalla and Elegabalus added together look like pikers".
* But at least they aren't stupid about it - insufficiently paranoid, perhaps, to not wonder if their magic control liquid can be ordered into ineffectuality, but not actually stupid. And nice job of infiltrating the anti-them organization and keeping it totally ineffective methodwise.
* ...and yep, the designated-throwaway Blending of discarded noble scions is doing a nice job of demonstrating exactly why it was made of designated throwaways. Dangerous to everyone, but especially their own infrastructure.
* Oh, Tamrissa and Vallant. You are out-Robert-Jordan-charactering Robert Jordan characters right now, and you're even in the same place. I like you, and all, but please get over it soon.
* Interesting ways of organizing a slave-sorcerer army, segments and link-groups, etc. Although relying so much on that magical control liquid to keep it in line? Definite insufficient paranoia, chaps.
* Is that a suggestion that the "barbarians" next door may just have developed Blendings of their own? I think it just might be.
( http://weblog.siliconcerebrate.com/cerebrate/2008/03/betrayals-sharon-green.html ) ( )

Not that great of a series. ( )