I will always associate two series of books with my starting to write book reviews online. One is Ashok Banker's modern adaptation of The Ramayana and the other is The Eldarn Sequence by Robert Scott and the late Jay Gordon. Although the books are worlds apart, the impact they had on me was identical: "I must tell people about these books."
Ashok's books were already past the mid point when I caught up with Rama on his quest, but in the case of The Eldarn Sequence I came in at the beginning just after book one, The Hickory Staff, was published. I have followed it through the process of publication until now as it prepares to go to press with book three The Larion Senators I am able to be in on its completion as well.
As firsts go, first literary interview may not rank too high for some people, but my interview with Ashok will always be the first author interview I conducted and to this day remains one of my favourites. Robert Scott was my second author interview but his series represents two other firsts for me. Lessek's Key, book two of the series, is the first ever book to carry a quote from one of my reviews on its dust jacket, and will always be the first set of author's proofs I've ever read.
The final book of The Ramayana was released some time ago, and my review is gathering dust in many site's archives but my association with Ashok hasn't ended as I now edit his online publication for the international Arts & Culture Epic India Magazine. I don't know what my association with Robert Scott will constitute in the future, but I do know that my head is still reeling from the ride of reading The Larion Senators, and bringing that journey to its successful conclusion.
Don't worry, I'm not going to tell you how it ends, except to say that it doesn't end, it begins — but I do want to tell you what an excellent job was done in bringing the story to it's conclusion. Robert and Jay have left us with a pretty nasty cliff-hanger at the end of book two (if you haven't read that - don't worry, I won't even give that away) and the challenge as far as I could see was going to be creating a plausible way out of it. Even with 550 plus pages, I thought they'd be hard pressed to accomplish that and stitch together all the loose ends that have been left dangling since book one.
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