Reviews - L'ombra del tempo passato

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3.81k reviews for:

L'ombra del tempo passato

James Islington

4.06 AVERAGE

robyn_hood's review against another edition

3.75

adventurous dark emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

bmcwilliams76's review against another edition

5.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense slow-paced

aidanwmitchell's review against another edition

4.0

adventurous mysterious fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

haruspex's review against another edition

2.0

Very high fantasy. Lots of unnecessarily complicated names for things. The author does not have any skill for brevity - you can skip over a good 50% of the language - and the weird Christian predeterminism is jarring. Characters are one dimensional, and the plot adds false complexity that’s not well laid out for the reader. I finished this because I kept hoping for some kind of satisfaction for unanswered questions, but this book is so redundantly wordy as to remove all the oomph of various revelations. Plus deus ex machina ending much?

novakid's review against another edition

2.0

The concept of this wasn't bad but it just wasn't executed well.

My biggest issue is that the characters feel so flat. Up until the main character has this training arc halfway through the book, you could swap any of the main characters in any scenario and they would all make the same decisions. The author constantly told us things rather than showing them. Whenever characters were conversing, they'd go over plot-relevant topics and the scene would end with something like "they talked for awhile longer before going to bed, it was relaxing." As a result there didn't feel like there was any chemistry between anyone. They were simply friends because the author said so.

There were some emotional moments, or they should have been emotional anyway. We usually got two lines on a reaction before swiftly moving on. Thus, it felt like there wasn't a lot of emotional depth with anyone and I didn't really come to like any of them as a reader.

Also something that really bothered me: there were so many overused words/phrases that were just filler to break up dialogue but they were used SO much. How many times did a character "nod" or "incline their head"? 604 times. How many times did a character rub their forehead? 55 times.

The book felt like it picked up in the second half and the author did genuinely try to build a fantasy world. I'm definitely not continuing the series but I may keep an eye on The Will of the Many and hope that he's improved over the years.