NOTE: My rating would be closer to a 3.5

Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber is a series I’ve been vaguely familiar with for a while now, knowing that it was a big influence on Martin’s Game of Thrones (another series I have yet to read…or watch for that matter) among other things.

Nine Princes in Amber is ambitious, without a doubt. Large cast of characters, large scope, parallel universes, all that jazz. Zelazny has a wonderful sense for writing action, and he manages to make the nine titular princes all distinct characters, with their own strengths and weaknesses. The book also uses the first-person narration of Corwin to keep the reader grounded within all the strange and eclectic changes of scenery and the whirlwind of concepts. However, while its ambition is not only its greatest strength, its also the book’s biggest flaw… The first Amber book is VERY short (my edition, with its larger format, is just shy of 120 pages) and I don’t think that’s long enough to really flesh out the myriad of ideas Zelazny has in play. I realize this is something he’s developed over the course of nearly a dozen books (and in given time, I’ll read more of them, I’m sure) but with so much going on in such a short amount of pages, there’s not a lot of room to breathe and it gets a bit overwhelming and breakneck, even introducing ideas and characters within the last couple of chapters.

This all said, I can forgive the fact that it’s tradition for the first book, especially in longer series like these, to have the burden of setting everything up. I have a strong feeling the sequels will be more enjoyable.