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madisonbookworm's review against another edition
5.0
The term “unputdownable” was invented for this book. So glad I took a chance on such an obscure book. It was amazing.
evaserrate's review
5.0
Innovative new fantasy. A bit odd at times, but I suppose that comes with the problem of finding new twists in the fantasy world.
wyvernfriend's review against another edition
4.0
Tylar de Noche is already in trouble, he was betrayed and broken in a slave ship. He was once a shadowknight of the realm, now his sword hand is useless and his legs and back are twisted. He comforts himself with drink, and one day as he goes home he finds himself drawn to a woman's screams. He holds her in his arms as she dies and he realises that she's in fact a goddess and when other people arrive they think that he's the killer.
Tylar finds that he has to be the pivot in an attempt to save the world.
It's interesting and while it is quite a large book I found this quite an interesting read. I was drawn into the characters and really wanted to know what was going to happen next. I do want to read more of the series and see what happens next.
Tylar finds that he has to be the pivot in an attempt to save the world.
It's interesting and while it is quite a large book I found this quite an interesting read. I was drawn into the characters and really wanted to know what was going to happen next. I do want to read more of the series and see what happens next.
impishideas's review
2.0
Shadowfall is a book with a single good idea draped over the skeleton of literally every fantasy story you have ever read. It's that familiar plot structure about several groups of people undergoing a globetrotting adventure in which a shadowy eeeevil group are trying to stop them at every turn, and by the end the mysteries have been solved and they're all together for the final showdown. This ensures a constant level of action that is at first fun, and then gets EXHAUSTING, particularly past the 50% mark in which the infodumps really get going. Like, god, none of these characters are given time to breathe, and as a result, most of the cast are archetypal at best. Dart is probably the most likeable, having some semblance of a character arc, even if it's largely concerned with sexual assault.
Oh, yes, sexual assault happens several times in this book, and is mentioned just often enough to get uncomfortable, like a red flag but at kinda half mast? And any time a female character is introduced to a scene, the prose lingers on her features just long enough for me to feel slightly dirty. Most of the women in the book are, in some way, entangled with Tylar, the nominal protagonist, and while it's never presented as unambiguously romantic, it's, again, uncomfortable. Particularly uncomfy is the wlw goddess, Fyla, who kisses Tylar multiple times because she can feel her old, female lover inside of him. This is never not intensely awkward and icky, and plainly feels like an excuse for Clemens to have his only established, living, queer woman kiss a straight man. Like, props for including her at all I guess, but this sucks.
Aside from his fear of becoming a cripple again, Tylar is literally a boilerplate 25-35 year old, white, male fantasy protagonist. He is a boiled potato in a dress shirt, and it feels like Clemens didn't really know how to have him interact with women outside of his ex-lover, or thinks in some way that men and women can't interact without some level of sexual tension. Like, dude, just let them be friends! Stop having Tylar covertly ogle Delia already! She's clearly not into him that way, and their lack of chemistry just makes the scene uncomfortable as hell whenever he does. This isn't a harem comedy series, and your protagonist could very well be pushing forty, jesus D:
Kathryn ser Vail feels like a passable, if bland, attempt by a middle aged man at writing a woman. Her struggles with her feelings about Tylar are more interesting than the man himself, even if it's all a bit by-the-numbers for 'straight middle-aged man fears', down to the miscarried baby. While she's more prone to tears than the men, she's highly competent. I just overall wish there was a bit more character drama and feelings, and a bit less big heroic action setpieces/'shocking' plot twists, because Clemens seems much better at writing quiet character interactions and interesting tidbits of lore than he is at writing swordplay. Or conspiracy plots, for that matter.
Something I've realized after thinking on this story is that most of what I disliked just came back to Tylar. The pacing is the way it is because Tylar needs to get, almost literally, from one side of a huge map to the other. The characterization is rushed because said extended chase sequence eats up just so much page count for so little actual benefit to the plot, while being almost untethered from it. The chase scene is a closed loop of consequence, barring an appearance by The Villains(tm), all for the sake of having a Big Fantasy Epic Journey. Even if Clemens had a desire to make compelling villains, there's no room to develop them because of Tylar's boring ass.
Meanwhile, Kathryn and Dart are otherwise a literal stone's throw from one another, working on unravelling the same passable mystery plot, until Tylar comes in almost literally through the wall of Tashijan to... not really add much of anything to the core conspiracy/mystery plot beyond your typical bland fantasy protagonist stuff. He wields the magic sword, because duh, but honestly... it could've been anyone. It should have been anyone else. Kathryn's a mother who lost her baby, and Dart's an orphan - make it a found family thing with deeper emotional bonds. As it is, Meeryn's death ends up being almost completely disconnected from the story being told, beyond the general existence of Naethryn, and the specific word 'Rivenscryr' so Tylar's entire contribution to the story ends up being a fantastic waste of time by all accounts. Literally, scrap Tylar, make the story more about Dart's life as a Hand to Chrism, and most of my complaints barring the equally poorly handled rape scene just go away.
Which is all kind of a shame, because the magic system is genuinely quite fun. Like, the particulars of it kind of amount to thinking really hard about what you want to happen (aka the 'when you wish upon a star' system) or 'it's complex alchemy so I can't tell you lmao' but it's evocative enough to make the world feel interesting, certainly. We wouldn't even need Tylar's boring ass to drag us through an explanation of how it works, given Dart ends up as Hand of Blood, with ready access to other humors, a situation canonically established by Delia as a source of alchemical fun. As it stands, the book's worldbuilding is often crammed awkwardly between action setpieces, but what's there gives a good sense of a world stuck between ritual and practicality, and humans who, while reverent to the gods, are also very much colonized by them.
It's just a pity Clemens doesn't seem cognizant that theme, and of how sympathetic he made his villains when they're not Eating Puppies(tm), because the world he's made is far from idealistic, but our heroes largely seem indifferent to the injustices of the status quo. People are legally enslaved, impaled, crippled, permanently transformed, burned out with godly essences... but at no point does the idea of this system itself being bad and in need of change come into focus. Hearing Tylar (a man crippled by the failure and corruption of his society) defend said society to a disabled character it also unequivocally failed, as if 'gods bad' is a position too ludicrous to conscion, was heartbreaking and deeply frustrating. A better author would have made Tylar's incredulity part of his character - a continued faith in the gods as 'just how it is', that he can't imagine anything else but what he knows - and made use of all those colonialism themes that are literally baked into his worldbuilding, but Clemens actively spits on that idea. Given his oblivious white boy protagonist who spends most of his time on page with an idealized able body, I'm guessing putting himself in the shoes of the disabled, or any other marginalized people, was just too much for him to comprehend for more than five pages at a time.
Shadowfall is boilerplate fantasy. It has one good idea, the magic system of bodily humors. Dart is a believable teen girl in my opinion, if a bit flat. Everything else is the same loud, dumb, vaguely sexist/ablist/male-centric schlock you've seen a thousand times from this era of fantasy. At the rare times it is not being those things, it becomes something that could have been very fun, to my unending frustration. It's readable, but I honestly wouldn't recommend it.
Oh, yes, sexual assault happens several times in this book, and is mentioned just often enough to get uncomfortable, like a red flag but at kinda half mast? And any time a female character is introduced to a scene, the prose lingers on her features just long enough for me to feel slightly dirty. Most of the women in the book are, in some way, entangled with Tylar, the nominal protagonist, and while it's never presented as unambiguously romantic, it's, again, uncomfortable. Particularly uncomfy is the wlw goddess, Fyla, who kisses Tylar multiple times because she can feel her old, female lover inside of him. This is never not intensely awkward and icky, and plainly feels like an excuse for Clemens to have his only established, living, queer woman kiss a straight man. Like, props for including her at all I guess, but this sucks.
Aside from his fear of becoming a cripple again, Tylar is literally a boilerplate 25-35 year old, white, male fantasy protagonist. He is a boiled potato in a dress shirt, and it feels like Clemens didn't really know how to have him interact with women outside of his ex-lover, or thinks in some way that men and women can't interact without some level of sexual tension. Like, dude, just let them be friends! Stop having Tylar covertly ogle Delia already! She's clearly not into him that way, and their lack of chemistry just makes the scene uncomfortable as hell whenever he does. This isn't a harem comedy series, and your protagonist could very well be pushing forty, jesus D:
Kathryn ser Vail feels like a passable, if bland, attempt by a middle aged man at writing a woman. Her struggles with her feelings about Tylar are more interesting than the man himself, even if it's all a bit by-the-numbers for 'straight middle-aged man fears', down to the miscarried baby. While she's more prone to tears than the men, she's highly competent. I just overall wish there was a bit more character drama and feelings, and a bit less big heroic action setpieces/'shocking' plot twists, because Clemens seems much better at writing quiet character interactions and interesting tidbits of lore than he is at writing swordplay. Or conspiracy plots, for that matter.
Something I've realized after thinking on this story is that most of what I disliked just came back to Tylar. The pacing is the way it is because Tylar needs to get, almost literally, from one side of a huge map to the other. The characterization is rushed because said extended chase sequence eats up just so much page count for so little actual benefit to the plot, while being almost untethered from it. The chase scene is a closed loop of consequence, barring an appearance by The Villains(tm), all for the sake of having a Big Fantasy Epic Journey. Even if Clemens had a desire to make compelling villains, there's no room to develop them because of Tylar's boring ass.
Meanwhile, Kathryn and Dart are otherwise a literal stone's throw from one another, working on unravelling the same passable mystery plot, until Tylar comes in almost literally through the wall of Tashijan to... not really add much of anything to the core conspiracy/mystery plot beyond your typical bland fantasy protagonist stuff. He wields the magic sword, because duh, but honestly... it could've been anyone. It should have been anyone else. Kathryn's a mother who lost her baby, and Dart's an orphan - make it a found family thing with deeper emotional bonds. As it is, Meeryn's death ends up being almost completely disconnected from the story being told, beyond the general existence of Naethryn, and the specific word 'Rivenscryr' so Tylar's entire contribution to the story ends up being a fantastic waste of time by all accounts. Literally, scrap Tylar, make the story more about Dart's life as a Hand to Chrism, and most of my complaints barring the equally poorly handled rape scene just go away.
Which is all kind of a shame, because the magic system is genuinely quite fun. Like, the particulars of it kind of amount to thinking really hard about what you want to happen (aka the 'when you wish upon a star' system) or 'it's complex alchemy so I can't tell you lmao' but it's evocative enough to make the world feel interesting, certainly. We wouldn't even need Tylar's boring ass to drag us through an explanation of how it works, given Dart ends up as Hand of Blood, with ready access to other humors, a situation canonically established by Delia as a source of alchemical fun. As it stands, the book's worldbuilding is often crammed awkwardly between action setpieces, but what's there gives a good sense of a world stuck between ritual and practicality, and humans who, while reverent to the gods, are also very much colonized by them.
It's just a pity Clemens doesn't seem cognizant that theme, and of how sympathetic he made his villains when they're not Eating Puppies(tm), because the world he's made is far from idealistic, but our heroes largely seem indifferent to the injustices of the status quo. People are legally enslaved, impaled, crippled, permanently transformed, burned out with godly essences... but at no point does the idea of this system itself being bad and in need of change come into focus. Hearing Tylar (a man crippled by the failure and corruption of his society) defend said society to a disabled character it also unequivocally failed, as if 'gods bad' is a position too ludicrous to conscion, was heartbreaking and deeply frustrating. A better author would have made Tylar's incredulity part of his character - a continued faith in the gods as 'just how it is', that he can't imagine anything else but what he knows - and made use of all those colonialism themes that are literally baked into his worldbuilding, but Clemens actively spits on that idea. Given his oblivious white boy protagonist who spends most of his time on page with an idealized able body, I'm guessing putting himself in the shoes of the disabled, or any other marginalized people, was just too much for him to comprehend for more than five pages at a time.
Shadowfall is boilerplate fantasy. It has one good idea, the magic system of bodily humors. Dart is a believable teen girl in my opinion, if a bit flat. Everything else is the same loud, dumb, vaguely sexist/ablist/male-centric schlock you've seen a thousand times from this era of fantasy. At the rare times it is not being those things, it becomes something that could have been very fun, to my unending frustration. It's readable, but I honestly wouldn't recommend it.
mrbear's review against another edition
1.0
This book is quite terrible. It is just a pile of cliches, mediocre writing, and characters who were neither compelling nor believable.