Subject: Waters: Changing Fate

From: [email-masked] (Dani Zweig)
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 1994 21:31:04 GMT

Elizabeth Waters's "Changing Fate" is enjoyable fluff.  Lady Acila is the
wish-fulfillment protagonist -- bright, capable, a priestess of an
undemanding religion, an occasional spellcaster, and a shapechanger.
(Pay no attention to the cover blurb about shapechangers being feared and
despised.  It's by turns untrue and irrelevant.)  

Acila is quite content running the keep while her father is off conquering
more land and her twin brother, Briam, tries to keep his lute in tune.
Then, one day, someone shows up with an army and her father's body,
meaning to conquer the keep and marry her.  Except that the conqueror in
question, Lord Ranulf, had nothing to do with her father's death, is
exquisitely courteous, only asks politely, and turns out to also be a
shapechanger. If you think you see where this is headed, you're quite right.

Acila and Briam flee for their lives (a process made more complicated by
poor planning and less complicated by the fact that Lord Ranulf makes no
attempt to stop them), and after a period of rough living, find themselves
in a neighboring kingdom which is ruled by a queen and her Year-King.  As
the name implies, Year-King is a position with wonderful perquisites but
not much of a future.  Naturally Briam gets the job, leaving Acila to
figure out how to keep his year from ending on a sour note.

I'm not really sure why the book is titled "Changing Fate":  Briam and
Acila go where they seem to have been headed from the first chapter,
conveniently meet all the right people at the right times, and wind up
with the fates foreshadowed for them.  But it's an enjoyable light read,
and the characters are engaging.  Waters makes interesting use of Acila's
shapechanging abilities (though I think she underestimates both the wing-
span required by a hundred-pound eagle and the conspicuousness of a
hundred-pound pussy cat jumping on one's bed).  Good, simple-minded fun
for $4.99.

-----
Dani Zweig
[email-masked]

	Who didn't melt down, but whose computer did.