The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon

Technically a Reread Review

So, The Black Gryphon and I have a bit of history. When I last did a Valdemar read through, The Black Gryphon ended up in my DNF pile after maybe a page. I’d somehow got it in my head that gryphons did not talk and I basically didn’t want to read a book narrated by a gryphon. This was after I’d been reading the various Heralds books and… yeah… not entirely sure about my mindset then, but I definitely finished The Black Gryphon this time.

The Black Gryphon is not what I would call a typical starting book. The reader is not treated as though this is their first foray into the world of Valdemar. Terms are just thrown out there and the reader is expected to keep up. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, just an interesting choice for a book that’s at least starting a trilogy. Some terms are later explained in depth, but I was flailing some initially. On this read, I was very happy to have the internet at my fingertips so I could look up what various terms meant and creature descriptions/images. I will, however, forever envision Hertasi as Randall from Monsters Inc. despite seeing images that have them looking much more aligator-like in the snout and coloring. Fight me.

Anyway, a good portion of The Black Gryphon is vignettes of war camp life. The camp is far enough from the front lines that not a lot actually happens. There is more character building than actual plot. The plot really kicks in during the last quarter of the book. Not a bad plot, though I am somewhat interested to see what happens with Ma’ar.

There’s a point in the book where Amberdrake has to explain two a pair of young healers what a kestra’chern is and actually does. This is done twice back-to-back. I found that really annoying. Honestly, that’s not the only point where the narration switches from not explaining to perhaps over explaining. It didn’t completely break me out of the story, but I did notice it.

There's a fair bit of parental philosophy thrown in here. Like, way more than I would normally expect, as none of the main characters have children. I mean, it's kind of spinning off stuff Urtho, creator of a bunch of magical critters, wrote, so it kind of makes sense. I was surprised. It's also not bad parenting philosophy either. Honestly, I agree with Urtho's assessment of human parents just being able to have kids all willy-nilly as a bad thing. It's part of why I support sex education and better access to contraceptives and, yes, abortion.

I would have liked an actual description of the makaar. Even googling them didn’t bring up much. I imagine they’re gryphon-like, but… ya know, would be nice to actually know.

So yeah, I actually made it through The Black Gryphon this time. It was alright. Very character driven. Not the best of the Valdemar series overall, but, ya know, not the worst.

Technically Spoilers Now

I said earlier that I was interested in what happened to Ma'ar, but I have since started The White Gryphon and... dude's dead, apparently. Go figure. I guess this is what happens when a series is essentially written to fill in backstory, like this one was. I mean, in hindsight (aka, after doing a tiny bit of research) The Black Gryphon really does read like a bunch of characters created in order to fill in the history of Valdemar a bit. And, ya know, the maakar exist here, but pretty much die out because Ma'ar died... for example. Nothing super in depth, just, like, how'd we get The Cataclysm and such... which I barely remember from my first Valdemar read through, to be honest. I dunno, just a thing I am now realizing as I start the next book.