Corsair by Chris Bunch

When I first came across this book, I said, "Cool! A pirate fantasy!" Aside from Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy, there's not a lot of this around. I was a bit hesitant when I saw that it was by one of the authors that wrote the Anteros series, which was pretty much fluff throughout. I figured I'd give it a chance anyway.

The characters that populate the book are nearly one dimensional. Bunch gives each personality quirks that distinguish them from one another but, aside from the main character, we never know their real motivations. This is especially frustrating with the antagonists. About 3/4 of the way through the book, something is revealed about them that just begs for more investigation, but it ultimately leads to nothing. The same thing can be said for the plot. After reading the last page, I wondered where the rest of it was and was disappointed that we didn't get to learn more about the true antagonists. The book was written two years ago, so it seems unlikely that we'll see a sequel if we haven't by now.

That was the major problem I had with this book. There was all this setup and development of the motivation for the main character, but there isn't ever any true resolution of this conflict. There's a somewhat "happy" ending, but it was completely unsatisfactory after all the build up. Not that the book wasn't somewhat enjoyable. There were some interesting plot twists and ideas put forth, but there wasn't any payoff for the reader. The character interaction was decent, but I felt that there should have been more space devoted to developing the supporting characters more and making all of them more three dimensional. The world could have used some more fleshing out as well.

All in all, a pretty mediocre read. Nothing that I'd really recommend, but it wasn't badly written. I think the page count could have been doubled to add more meat to the story as well as to develop a satisfactory ending and the lack of these really hurt the book.