I wish I could have liked Nine Princes in Amber. It has a lot going for it: It is Fantasy, but very nonstandard, all the while playing with the default Fantasy tropes. It’s unapologetically weird. I adored the weirdness. I could even have lived with the lame storytelling device of “protagonist loses memory, brings reader up to speed”, if only …
I think what threw me off was really how the protagonist didn’t feel real. Unemotional, or just unrelatable? But if you chuck the protagonist into prison for several years, blinding him in the process, I’d expect to have some emotional stake in it, even if it isn’t Monte Cristo level. But I didn’t.
I probably won’t read another book of this series any time soon, but I’ll give Zelazny another shot, in the hopes of finding something I’m more compatible with.
