This is a very short book, but it felt much longer and in a good way.

We start with Corwin waking up in a hospital and not remembering anything. I really enjoyed the slow uncovering of the characters and the world as he remembers them. It's also quite tense as his life might depend on others not noticing that he is just pretending to know everything.

Now the world that gets slowly uncovered is certainly an interesting one. Same as the magic.
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I first read this maybe 20 years ago and it always stuck in my memory.
Unfortunately, didn't have the rest of the books in the series at the time.

Got all 10 Amber books now and am currently reading them.
Absolutely Loving them. They keep building up, with twists that I at least didn't see coming.
Even the fourth book keeps referring back to this book and the pieces keep coming together.

Also like the fact that they are all reasonably short. I'm not a big one for sophisticated writing and overblown imagery. Just loving the story, the plot twists, and excited about what direction it will head next.

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Dreamboat 70's Man is too cool for school, but becomes tolerable by the closing chapters. It's a fun launching point for a series and Amber is a good concept. ( )

Revisited a series I read back in 82 or 83. I thought it good then. Times change.

Fast paced plot, with cardboard characters. I might try book 2 to see if it gets better. That was what drew me to the series when I was a teenager. ( )

I went into this book with pretty low expectations. I’d disliked the author’s Lord of Light quite a lot. I did think A Night in the Lonesome October was cute, but nothing special. I think my reaction to this book leaned more toward the latter, but I liked it better than I feared I would and it’s less than 200 pages so it was a quick read.

The setting was initially more modern than I expected, set I guess around the time the book was published in 1970. We’re introduced to the main character, Corwin, as he wakes up in a hospital with no memories of who he is or how he got there, and it seems he’s being kept against his will. Through a combination of pretending to know more than he does and convenient intuition, he manages to get away and find allies. The actual plot doesn’t take off until a good ways into the book, so I don’t want to spoil it.

I never felt any great investment in Corwin or any of the other characters, but I remained moderately interested in him throughout the book and the plot held my attention pretty well. The amnesia trope got a little frustrating to me in the beginning because I had trouble buying into all of Corwin’s convenient intuitions. In retrospect it might be believable, but it didn’t feel that way at the time I was reading those parts. I was curious about what was going on though, so that helped to hold my attention, and then the story became more interesting to me further on, although it did have some slow spots.

This story isn’t very satisfying by itself. It doesn’t end on a true cliffhanger, but the main plot is definitely not resolved and there are a lot of open questions. I might have given in to the temptation to keep reading if I’d had it in the omnibus format, but I just had this as a single volume and I don’t feel a burning desire to read more of the series so I don’t plan to seek it out. I’m rating it at 3.5 stars and rounding down to 3 on Goodreads. ( )