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blainembentley's review against another edition
4.0
As I look at this book and prepare a review, I see this book in 3 parts, having different feelings for all 3 parts.
The first part (from my point of view) was very typical of what I would expect for a fantasy story. It was very textbook like in its structure and organization. It was done very well, but it wasn’t anything that was novel, it wasn’t anything that really stood out for me when compared to other fantasy books.
This second part was very dry and hard for me to get through. I just don’t feel that this part was very important to the overall story or important to the development of the characters. It felt mostly unnecessary to me.
This last part was the best of all for me. There was a certain event that happened that instantly hooked me. It got me really excited to see what was in store for the remainder of the book. From that point I was really invested. It was unfortunate it took so long to get there. Although this particular event was resolved a little too quickly for my taste, I do feel there was just enough for me to stay invested.
Overall, I felt worldbuilding was too much of an info dump here and there. There is some sort of magic system, one that I don’t feel was explained very well (also very much of an info dump).
However, the ending was awesome and worth the journey! There was a lot of great character development in this book that I really enjoyed. I wouldn’t say this is a must read, but I would recommend giving it a try.
sarah_j_r's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
4.5
themanfromdelmonte's review against another edition
3.0
Sigh It's too long, and almost indigestibly wordy at times. And it insists on following every viewpoint.
It’s taken 824 pages to get to the end of the first instalment. Let me sum up for you, Aren is Frodo, Cade is Sam, Carrick is Boromir, Vika/Mara are/is Gandalf, the Dreadknights are the Nazgul, Hammerholt is Mount Doom.
In the next books I'm sure we'll encounter whatever fell entity is directing the Krodan Empire (psst, it's Sauron) but I haven't the patience to wade through any more. I will also now shelve The Lies Of Locke Lamora, possibly indefinitely.
(It's also hard to credit that Aren is only 16.)
It’s taken 824 pages to get to the end of the first instalment. Let me sum up for you, Aren is Frodo, Cade is Sam, Carrick is Boromir, Vika/Mara are/is Gandalf, the Dreadknights are the Nazgul, Hammerholt is Mount Doom.
In the next books I'm sure we'll encounter whatever fell entity is directing the Krodan Empire (psst, it's Sauron) but I haven't the patience to wade through any more. I will also now shelve The Lies Of Locke Lamora, possibly indefinitely.
(It's also hard to credit that Aren is only 16.)
saistewart's review against another edition
5.0
Over my reading slump! I can see the LOTR inspiration but it really isn’t like it at all. The characters are a lot more nuanced and I appreciate how unlikeable every single person in our main cast of characters was at some point or other.
slavicreader's review against another edition
adventurous
funny
slow-paced
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
1.5
Beware: I did not enjoy this book and while I'll try to highlight some positives, my reading experience was not good overall.
The first 40% was so, so good! I loved the prison and castle arcs. There was humour, trickery and suffering. It was a great blend of everything you could ever want from a traditional fantasy.
Then. Well, then the rest of the book happened.
The next 40% made me want to bash my head in. We were introduced to move POVs and I found myself simply not caring. At all. Doesn't help that nothing much happened, and instead we had to listen to "terrifying" men whine about one thing or another. So many things irked me. Writing inconsistencies. Character plot holes. Once I saw these things, it also became hard to unsee them - they continued to bother me until the very end.
I won't go into too much detail about evey single thing that irked me. But I will say; for a heist book, there's very little heist to go around. The last 15% or so was the heist? For a chunky book, it's just mostly full of... Nothing. No plot.
My enjoyment ever so slightly picked up in the last 20%, but not enough to salvage much. I will not be reading the sequel and given that this is Wooding's most well known title, his work probably just isn't for me.
On a final note, I loved Grub. He carries the whole book on his shoulders, what a champ.
The first 40% was so, so good! I loved the prison and castle arcs. There was humour, trickery and suffering. It was a great blend of everything you could ever want from a traditional fantasy.
Then. Well, then the rest of the book happened.
The next 40% made me want to bash my head in. We were introduced to move POVs and I found myself simply not caring. At all. Doesn't help that nothing much happened, and instead we had to listen to "terrifying" men whine about one thing or another. So many things irked me. Writing inconsistencies. Character plot holes. Once I saw these things, it also became hard to unsee them - they continued to bother me until the very end.
I won't go into too much detail about evey single thing that irked me. But I will say; for a heist book, there's very little heist to go around. The last 15% or so was the heist? For a chunky book, it's just mostly full of... Nothing. No plot.
My enjoyment ever so slightly picked up in the last 20%, but not enough to salvage much. I will not be reading the sequel and given that this is Wooding's most well known title, his work probably just isn't for me.
On a final note, I loved Grub. He carries the whole book on his shoulders, what a champ.
atagarev's review against another edition
3.0
3.5/5
The narrative constantly teeters back and forth between epic fantasy and realism but manages to maintain a precarious balance throughout the story. On one level, this is a story about a tenacious rag-tag group overcoming great odds and struggling against the forces of darkness; very much in the style of Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time and some other classic fantasy series from the '80s. On another level, it injects a dose of realism about how nobility and heroism run head first into self-preservation, training and the inability to sustain an inspirational high for any length of time; very much in the style of The First Law and Black company series or the more shocking moments of Song of Ice and Fire.
While I mostly mean these comparisons in thematic terms, there are large chunks of the book that will be extremely familiars to people who've read those works. A whole quarter of the book is devoted to something remarkably similar to the Fellowship's journey from The Shrine to Lothlórien, there are several betrayals and surprising but logical deaths that would be at home in Song of Ice and Fire (but with not nearly enough build to match the most shocking examples there), one of the characters has so many Gandalf moments up to and including a symbolic death-and-rebirth-with-increased-power-and-understanding. And despite the slightly changed names, we have orcs, elves, dragons and a whole bunch of other classic fantasy creatures. All these things occupy the nebulous space between homage and copying but they are just different enough and combined in sufficiently novel ways that the story never felt like something I'd read before.
The characters are fine. Obviously some thought has been put into their motivations, desires and interactions so they feel fairly fleshed out. There were either too many of them or their motivations were a bit too straightforward or both but at any rate I never really loved any of them. I was interested to see what would happen to them but I never quite got invested in their fates.
The writing style is serviceable and quite appropriate for the story overall. There weren't ever any moments where it was either distractingly stilted and forced or exceptionally immersing and impressive, it was just good enough to be unnoticeable. There were the occasional typos (spelling mistake, repeated word, wrong tense, etc.) that really should have been caught by the editor. There was only one aspect in which the writing seriously failed, imo- throughout the book there is this song being built up, we get to hear parts of it and different versions and at the end we hear the whole finished song in a moment that is meant to be inspirational and very emotional... except the lyrics themselves just fail to deliver. They are fine, they get the idea across but it just isn't affecting the way good poetry should be.
On that note, the story felt just a bit too unfocused. Nothing was totally extraneous and there were enough connections between events to make it all recognizably a single story but most characters spend a large chunk of it with no motivation beyond simply surviving. It is nearly two-thirds into the book before the ultimate goal is revealed but even then none of the characters really care about it and just go along with the flow. It is not until the last fifty or so pages that everyone really commits to achieving something proactively which is a long time to go with our "protagonists" having no compelling common goal.
Overall I would say this was a pretty middle of the road book. There was nothing that really bothered me but there was also nothing I really loved. If the next book in the series were available at the moment, I might have picked it up but by the time it comes out, I will have probably forgotten everything about the series.
The narrative constantly teeters back and forth between epic fantasy and realism but manages to maintain a precarious balance throughout the story. On one level, this is a story about a tenacious rag-tag group overcoming great odds and struggling against the forces of darkness; very much in the style of Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time and some other classic fantasy series from the '80s. On another level, it injects a dose of realism about how nobility and heroism run head first into self-preservation, training and the inability to sustain an inspirational high for any length of time; very much in the style of The First Law and Black company series or the more shocking moments of Song of Ice and Fire.
While I mostly mean these comparisons in thematic terms, there are large chunks of the book that will be extremely familiars to people who've read those works. A whole quarter of the book is devoted to something remarkably similar to the Fellowship's journey from The Shrine to Lothlórien, there are several betrayals and surprising but logical deaths that would be at home in Song of Ice and Fire (but with not nearly enough build to match the most shocking examples there), one of the characters has so many Gandalf moments up to and including a symbolic death-and-rebirth-with-increased-power-and-understanding. And despite the slightly changed names, we have orcs, elves, dragons and a whole bunch of other classic fantasy creatures. All these things occupy the nebulous space between homage and copying but they are just different enough and combined in sufficiently novel ways that the story never felt like something I'd read before.
The characters are fine. Obviously some thought has been put into their motivations, desires and interactions so they feel fairly fleshed out. There were either too many of them or their motivations were a bit too straightforward or both but at any rate I never really loved any of them. I was interested to see what would happen to them but I never quite got invested in their fates.
The writing style is serviceable and quite appropriate for the story overall. There weren't ever any moments where it was either distractingly stilted and forced or exceptionally immersing and impressive, it was just good enough to be unnoticeable. There were the occasional typos (spelling mistake, repeated word, wrong tense, etc.) that really should have been caught by the editor. There was only one aspect in which the writing seriously failed, imo- throughout the book there is this song being built up, we get to hear parts of it and different versions and at the end we hear the whole finished song in a moment that is meant to be inspirational and very emotional... except the lyrics themselves just fail to deliver. They are fine, they get the idea across but it just isn't affecting the way good poetry should be.
On that note, the story felt just a bit too unfocused. Nothing was totally extraneous and there were enough connections between events to make it all recognizably a single story but most characters spend a large chunk of it with no motivation beyond simply surviving. It is nearly two-thirds into the book before the ultimate goal is revealed but even then none of the characters really care about it and just go along with the flow. It is not until the last fifty or so pages that everyone really commits to achieving something proactively which is a long time to go with our "protagonists" having no compelling common goal.
Overall I would say this was a pretty middle of the road book. There was nothing that really bothered me but there was also nothing I really loved. If the next book in the series were available at the moment, I might have picked it up but by the time it comes out, I will have probably forgotten everything about the series.