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3.15 AVERAGE
3.15 AVERAGE
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I picked this book up genuinely curious. I know the author is very politically opinionated and wasn’t sure how much of the mixed review score was due to actual book quality and how much was due to people rating the book based on their (positive or negative) opinions of the author himself, with the expectation that this story was most likely average. I began optimistic, and by around page 4 I was still optimistic but mostly by reminding myself that I’ve read and enjoyed fanfics at about this writing quality, and then at some point I was just reading because I’d feel guilty DNFing when the library bought this at my request. Then some switch just flipped in my brain around chapter 10 and I started reading out of a scientific curiosity as to how many things were wrong with this story.
Anyway, the book's bad. I'd feel mean for lambasting it except that I noticed the author has an hour long video defending it, which I did not watch because the only real defense for this is "it was written by someone who was still learning."
On a concept level its salvageable. It's a functional enough first draft that, if the author learned from his mistakes and tackled them in revisions, some later draft might have genuinely been average. The problem is that this is the final draft and there's just not much in the execution to carry the concept. Apologies for the disorganized way I'm about to vomit these out in. Problems include:
Anyway, the book's bad. I'd feel mean for lambasting it except that I noticed the author has an hour long video defending it, which I did not watch because the only real defense for this is "it was written by someone who was still learning."
On a concept level its salvageable. It's a functional enough first draft that, if the author learned from his mistakes and tackled them in revisions, some later draft might have genuinely been average. The problem is that this is the final draft and there's just not much in the execution to carry the concept. Apologies for the disorganized way I'm about to vomit these out in. Problems include:
- The moral mess that is a story exploring whether even the worst person imaginable can be redeemed, where every other villain encountered is brutally and violently murdered in edgy 90s antihero fashion as they beg for mercy.
- The other moral mess that is the two criminals who get spared because of the ability of the characters to sense people's moral rightness. Or more specifically, to sense their self-righteousness. It's explicitly laid out that the moral sensor power isn't accurate in assessing morality because detects how moral people think they are, such that a criminal who feels bad for their actions ought to ping as 'less self-righteous' while someone who sees nothing wrong with their crimes should be 'more self-righteous', yet the characters treat anyone low in self-righteousness as irredeemably evil.
- Clunky sentences. While the narrative style is an easy enough one to glide through, its hindered by a myriad of sentences that are lacking in commas, should have actually been three or four different sentences but are instead a behemoth of conjunctions, or else try to connect ideas in unintuitive ways that force you to re-read to make sense of what was just said.
- Over-reliance on adverbs. Often when there was a common verb that could have conveyed the correct sentiment correctly. This was especially common with dialogue tags.
- Constant dramatic dialogue. Suspension of disbelief breaking dialogue. Daylen never shuts up with the cryptic lines hinting at his true nature while trying to hide his identity and everyone always yells like they're a Youtuber playing all 4 characters in their Dragon Ball parody skit.
- Lack of faith in the reader to be able to understand what's happening. Things are often over-explained.
- No depth in describing emotion. If someone is sad, they wail and then you get a paragraph stating how unbearably sad they are.
- I think Daylen starts crying over how bad he feels about having done bad things about 20 times, and it's always followed by very same-y paragraphs telling you that this is very sad and painful with the only "showing" of his emotion being that he started wailing. I think there was a time where he started crying while he was already crying, but maybe the unclear phrasing just kept me from realizing that he stopped for five seconds.
- Inconsistent characterization where everyone seemed to undergo rapid mood swings in order to ensure they behaved the correct way to progress any given scene. (The pattern of everyone shifting gears so fast ended up ruining what should have been a cathartic moment in the climax.)
- Informed attributes where Daylen is supposedly incredibly smart and competent at everything yet repeatedly makes dumb or careless moves or blatantly fails to demonstrate a supposed skill in order to keep the scene developing at the pace the author wanted.
- (Speaking of, "I will do this on my own terms" is Daylen's rationale for a myriad of irrational behaviors that allow the plot to unfold as it does. It's a cute justification to give a character who's all about self-loathing and believing he deserves nothing. The moral guide character never disputes it.)
- There's a moral guide character who explicitly sides with Daylen's actions such that the story has blatant, affirmed via repeated dialogue protagonist-centered morality, which is impressive for a story about a genocidal dictator who knows he did wrong.
- Excessive exposition pt 1: I didn't try to count the number of scenes in which Daylen is off on his own and systematically tests out his powers in order to establish as many hard rules as possible for the reader.
- (This does not stop the author from busting out new applications for the magic system whenever it's convenient, including having Daylen be the first person to ever consider amplifying his intelligence mid-climax in order to magically be granted more knowledge of how to fight.)
- Excessive exposition pt 2: If Character A and the reader know something that Character B does not, Character A will explain it to Character B in depth, just so the reader can get the exposition dump a second time.
- He might assume the readers will forget because his characters regularly forget things they already learned or thought through. Daylen has the same breakdown and series of revelations over the identity of one of the men he killed twice in the span of one day..
- I wouldn't normally complain about the super hearing and vision following Superman logic, but it was actually obnoxious how much any biology-based feats were handwaved as conveniently working as they would in any softer magic setting while anything that let the author nerd out about physics had to put the action on pause to lecture about all the various physics properties that needed to be consciously manipulated in concert. It made it feel less like a really detailed magic system and more like an attempt by someone to use their one strong suit to hide their lack of interest in researching everything else.
- Excessive exposition pt 3: A weird fixation on math and hard numbers. I don't even mean the physics and magic interplay. The thickness of the floating island is given so that the author can then calculate how long it takes to fall at terminal velocity from the island's edge to its base. In one scene, the description of a cell includes the exact centimeter width of the bars and the gaps between them.
- But for the excessive exposition, the broader story pacing would probably be okay. A number of conveniences allow things to escalate fast towards the end, but the progression is at least all there. I'd say it meanders until about the 50% point, but I've seen worse.
- The sentence level pacing is a separate issue. It is dissonance inducing. There are tricks to summarize the passage of time while still giving an actual sense of time passing, and the author uses none of them. Many an action scene plays out in slow motion.
- The author soap boxes. He will just stop the story for a couple paragraphs or a page to blather on about some bit of world building that is a thinly veiled comment about how he thinks the world should be/is. It's hardly the first preachy book I've read, but usually they're better integrated into the narrative.
- No meaningful consequences. Daylen never messes up in a critical moment where he ends up worsening someone else's situation or doing anything to himself that has a lasting impact. Even when the author tries to give his powers a drawback in that certain applications give him a headache, it's basically a throwaway line. You're told Daylen has a headache and then the story moves on with no further acknowledgement of it or impairment to Daylen's abilities. In fact, he's specifically noted to be able to ignore it.
- No stakes. I guess this is a spoiler, but partway through the book Daylen dies of grief during an exposition dump and then his magic auto-heals him. There's no sense afterward that he's ever in any real danger.
- Massive tonal whiplash when the book wants to be gritty, which is a separate issue from the book simultaneously wanting to talk a lot about sexual violence while the author is reluctant to describe them in anything other than vague PG13 euphemisms. The words "rape" and "pedophile" do appear, but when the specifics are just called something to the effect of "disgusting acts" or whatnot, it feels juvenile.
- Each chapter opens with an epistolary segment from Daylen's final confessions. I'm pretty sure it's just there because Sanderson did the epistolary thing. There is exactly one segment that matters to the story, and it could have been slipped in to a regular chapter. The rest is just there for the aesthetic.
- A general sense that no meaningful revision happened. Mostly due to the multiple instances in which someone will mention someone in a (usually forced) way to try and fill in a plot hole from a little while back, even though they could have just said the thing a little while back. Almost as if the author only thought of that detail later in the drafting process and couldn't be bothered to go back and edit a previous scene.
- I hope he didn't pay for an editor, or that he got his money back if he did. Aside from punctuation errors and a missing space between words, there's also a character whose name changes spellings a couple times, including mid-page in the first chapter.
- Thinking back over it, I don't think Daylen actually undergoes any character development. There's a scene about his growth in the first third of the book, but then he doesn't retain that growth. Other people around him change by way of accepting and forgiving him, but he's the same person at the end as he is at the start, despite the book being about his quest to be better.
There are more issues with the book, but honestly I feel like I've already spent more time on it than I should have, so I'm going to stop there.
An Amazing Read
I got this book due to being a fan of Shad's YouTube channel, but I wasn't expecting it to be so good. I can tell that he really takes a lot of inspiration from Brandon Sanderson, but there's more than enough uniqueness to set this book, and this series apart. In particular, both the power system and the choice of protagonist are incredible, as they create a truly unique juxtaposition of huge familiarity with the more mundane world and a complete lack of knowledge with the more 'arcane'. I am looking forward to the next book!
Merged review:
An Amazing Read
I got this book due to being a fan of Shad's YouTube channel, but I wasn't expecting it to be so good. I can tell that he really takes a lot of inspiration from Brandon Sanderson, but there's more than enough uniqueness to set this book, and this series apart. In particular, both the power system and the choice of protagonist are incredible, as they create a truly unique juxtaposition of huge familiarity with the more mundane world and a complete lack of knowledge with the more 'arcane'. I am looking forward to the next book!
I got this book due to being a fan of Shad's YouTube channel, but I wasn't expecting it to be so good. I can tell that he really takes a lot of inspiration from Brandon Sanderson, but there's more than enough uniqueness to set this book, and this series apart. In particular, both the power system and the choice of protagonist are incredible, as they create a truly unique juxtaposition of huge familiarity with the more mundane world and a complete lack of knowledge with the more 'arcane'. I am looking forward to the next book!
Merged review:
An Amazing Read
I got this book due to being a fan of Shad's YouTube channel, but I wasn't expecting it to be so good. I can tell that he really takes a lot of inspiration from Brandon Sanderson, but there's more than enough uniqueness to set this book, and this series apart. In particular, both the power system and the choice of protagonist are incredible, as they create a truly unique juxtaposition of huge familiarity with the more mundane world and a complete lack of knowledge with the more 'arcane'. I am looking forward to the next book!
It's pretty good. I was expecting a much more sprawling continental epic but instead this focused on ~4 main characters and was more self-contained, which is a framework for a decent intrapersonal story of justice and repentance. At the same time it also reads like a Wolverine or Moon Knight origin comic with its anti-hero protagonist.
The setting is pretty wild and the magic system immediately feels like some tabletop RPG logic, like "I spend 2 bond points to increase HP recovery by 400%, and also my intelligence stat goes up by 10." I mean, I guess it's mostly consistent and fun to imagine so I can't fault it for not being interesting. But the "mysterious protagonist with immense power who is perfect at everything for some reason" trope is very strong here.
I liked Lyrah and Cueseg a lot, especially the presentation of Tuerasian culture as a sort of "alternate reality" in its take on discipline and self-control. I liked the themes of ending the cycle of violence through forgiveness, of the idea that everyone carries potentially fatal flaws and weakness which must be curbed and supported, and what exactly defines true justice.
It would have been nice maybe if gratuitous violence, sexual abuse and mass murder were not crucial plot points, but whatever.
The setting is pretty wild and the magic system immediately feels like some tabletop RPG logic, like "I spend 2 bond points to increase HP recovery by 400%, and also my intelligence stat goes up by 10." I mean, I guess it's mostly consistent and fun to imagine so I can't fault it for not being interesting. But the "mysterious protagonist with immense power who is perfect at everything for some reason" trope is very strong here.
I liked Lyrah and Cueseg a lot, especially the presentation of Tuerasian culture as a sort of "alternate reality" in its take on discipline and self-control. I liked the themes of ending the cycle of violence through forgiveness, of the idea that everyone carries potentially fatal flaws and weakness which must be curbed and supported, and what exactly defines true justice.
It would have been nice maybe if gratuitous violence, sexual abuse and mass murder were not crucial plot points, but whatever.
Should write a review at some point, since I've been following the author for so long. But hey, first book I finish since the start of the revolution :) (God bless audiobooks)
I'm gonna say 3.75 stars. I went back and forth on this one. Parts of it were awesome, but other parts were bogged down with SO much description and over explaining things that I was bored out of my mind. Also the main character is insufferable. He cries and wallows in self pity for being a horrible person but I found myself rolling my eyes a lot throughout the book. Okay, I get it. He feels bad for being a piece of shit. Can we get to the good part? Except he's also a huge asshole despite feeling so horrible? His growth shows toward the end once he gets his ego more in check, but he's still kind of a dick.
That being said, the world in this is fantastic, as well as some of the humor. It's very evident that Shad put a lot of work into this book and everything was very well thought out. The magic system was really awesome(aside from being over explained) and I loved how in depth he was with each race and made them all so different.
Overall, not bad!
That being said, the world in this is fantastic, as well as some of the humor. It's very evident that Shad put a lot of work into this book and everything was very well thought out. The magic system was really awesome(aside from being over explained) and I loved how in depth he was with each race and made them all so different.
Overall, not bad!
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
not a good book
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Rape, Sexual assault, Sexual harassment
Loveable characters:
No
This was horrible from front to back… I don’t even know where to begin. I’m not going to mark this for spoilers because I’m doing you a service if you read this. You’re saving a mountain of time by avoiding this book.
Full disclosure, I became aware of Shad Brooks through his various YouTube channels and subsequently learned of his writing endeavors via that. Having seen enough of him to get an idea of what he ~doesn’t~ like in a lot of media, I was pretty eager to see what his own writing was like. I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of his work, most of it is pretty shallow and his views are pretty antithetical to my own from what I’m able to gather. You could probably say I hate-read this… I knew what I was getting myself into, to a degree, and thought about DNF’ing it multiple times, but I felt like writing out this lengthy review would be way more fun in the end.
I typically don’t like ascribing a MC’s (or any character created for a story, tbf) views or behaviors to the author that created them. I think as an art form, writing should allow writers to create whatever characters and story they feel compelled to create within any given setting or genre. With that being said, oftentimes I feel like there are movies or works of art or, in this case, books that feel rather indulgent in certain areas and cease to be an attempt at artistic expression and more just an outlet for repressed thoughts or feelings. Maybe repressed isn’t the correct term, but it feels serviceable enough.
Shadow of the Conquerer feels like just an outlet for a sex-obsessed middle schooler. There were dick jokes within the first few chapters (also more later on in the book), constant talk about sex in a way that just felt unnatural, sexual assault/rape was mentioned too many times to count and was used as a way to show how “terrible” the protagonist was, yet in the end [Spoiler, if you care] the women who had been SA’d and produced children via SA had chosen to forgive and essentially wholly exonerate their abuser because he had given them the “best gift of their life”?
The MC was a pretty loose antihero (more like an anti-antihero) merely because all of the terrible things he had done happened way before the book even began. Once we start following the MC, [Spoiler I guess?] he tries to end his own life, only to be given a second chance at life in a new, younger body. Once this happens, he goes on what amounts to a book-long montage of “doing the right thing” and trying to act like he isn’t the person whom he appears to be.in his former life, he’s said to have been a ruthless conqueror that murdered lots of people and SA’d a lot of women, some as young as 14 (the “legal” age for the universe this is in… still weird and pedophilic). When he’s finally brought before a group of influential leaders and made to answer for those crimes he basically gets off with a slap on the wrist and it’s the least bit surprising. The way the story is written, I could feel that the MC is Shad’s golden child of an idea and he’d hate for anything tragic to actually happen that a reader wouldn’t expect. But making an anti-antihero who saves the day every time and never loses even when he is basically dying is just so immensely boring.
A short aside, the MC draws a strange moral line with child slavery stating it’s something he would never force on a child, yet he openly admits to SA’ing and killing children. I just don’t get it.
The dialogue felt like a first draft from someone who incessantly browses Reddit as a personality trait. Multiple uses of the word “retard” as an insult. Which is also just odd from a SFF sense. Again, I’m pretty liberal when it comes to allowing writers to write the types of stories and characters they want, but it’s at least got to make sense within the context of the world and the people we’re writing about. It’s never really pointed out and mostly just glossed over which leads me to believe that it’s not used to show even further how “bad” our MC is but just thrown in for the sake of needing an offensive insult. Not only does it feel very unprofessional, but it just took me out entirely. On top of that, there was at least one homophobic interaction between the MC and a supporting character that was completely unnecessary. If my my memory serves me right, I want to say the main character was asked to go for a walk to discuss some things, and the MC stated that it “sounded gay” or something along those lines. All around just unnecessary. There are plenty of better ways to express your characters’ morality than this low-bar attempt at checking boxes.
Lastly, the magic system, if you want to call it that, was just too much. And this one I’ll try to be a little more lenient on, because I don’t think I’m the biggest fan of hard magic systems anyways, but this just felt like overkill. When I’ve got 20 minutes of explaining mathematics and science in the most uninteresting way possibly in my SFF, I’m checking out, you lost me. I simply do not care that much. Maybe if the world and characters around that system were better I’d care more, but that has yet to be seen. As the book went on, I just felt like this was a near-blatant Star Wars ripoff with some sprinkles of Dune perhaps (which is potentially just a given since that’s Star Wars already). The “light” that this system is based on is just midichlorians/the force. The “Shadow” are the sith, and “Lightbringers” are basically Jedi. An attempt at adding intergalactic, or at least intragalactic, politics was made. Albeit, it comes across as weak compared to what it’s influenced by.
I’ll be completely honest in saying, that it’s not fair that I listened to this audiobook while in the middle of reading A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s a pretty stark (pun not intended) contrast in quality of work. However, I fully believe this wouldn’t hold up against any other contemporary SFF writer that’s self-published with half as many fans as Shad has at his disposal. Which honestly may be his biggest downfall. His brand of humor, loud criticism, and overall style of content lends itself to a certain type of yes men that won’t be willing to tell you when your shit stinks.
Full disclosure, I became aware of Shad Brooks through his various YouTube channels and subsequently learned of his writing endeavors via that. Having seen enough of him to get an idea of what he ~doesn’t~ like in a lot of media, I was pretty eager to see what his own writing was like. I wouldn’t consider myself a fan of his work, most of it is pretty shallow and his views are pretty antithetical to my own from what I’m able to gather. You could probably say I hate-read this… I knew what I was getting myself into, to a degree, and thought about DNF’ing it multiple times, but I felt like writing out this lengthy review would be way more fun in the end.
I typically don’t like ascribing a MC’s (or any character created for a story, tbf) views or behaviors to the author that created them. I think as an art form, writing should allow writers to create whatever characters and story they feel compelled to create within any given setting or genre. With that being said, oftentimes I feel like there are movies or works of art or, in this case, books that feel rather indulgent in certain areas and cease to be an attempt at artistic expression and more just an outlet for repressed thoughts or feelings. Maybe repressed isn’t the correct term, but it feels serviceable enough.
Shadow of the Conquerer feels like just an outlet for a sex-obsessed middle schooler. There were dick jokes within the first few chapters (also more later on in the book), constant talk about sex in a way that just felt unnatural, sexual assault/rape was mentioned too many times to count and was used as a way to show how “terrible” the protagonist was, yet in the end [Spoiler, if you care] the women who had been SA’d and produced children via SA had chosen to forgive and essentially wholly exonerate their abuser because he had given them the “best gift of their life”?
The MC was a pretty loose antihero (more like an anti-antihero) merely because all of the terrible things he had done happened way before the book even began. Once we start following the MC, [Spoiler I guess?] he tries to end his own life, only to be given a second chance at life in a new, younger body. Once this happens, he goes on what amounts to a book-long montage of “doing the right thing” and trying to act like he isn’t the person whom he appears to be.in his former life, he’s said to have been a ruthless conqueror that murdered lots of people and SA’d a lot of women, some as young as 14 (the “legal” age for the universe this is in… still weird and pedophilic). When he’s finally brought before a group of influential leaders and made to answer for those crimes he basically gets off with a slap on the wrist and it’s the least bit surprising. The way the story is written, I could feel that the MC is Shad’s golden child of an idea and he’d hate for anything tragic to actually happen that a reader wouldn’t expect. But making an anti-antihero who saves the day every time and never loses even when he is basically dying is just so immensely boring.
A short aside, the MC draws a strange moral line with child slavery stating it’s something he would never force on a child, yet he openly admits to SA’ing and killing children. I just don’t get it.
The dialogue felt like a first draft from someone who incessantly browses Reddit as a personality trait. Multiple uses of the word “retard” as an insult. Which is also just odd from a SFF sense. Again, I’m pretty liberal when it comes to allowing writers to write the types of stories and characters they want, but it’s at least got to make sense within the context of the world and the people we’re writing about. It’s never really pointed out and mostly just glossed over which leads me to believe that it’s not used to show even further how “bad” our MC is but just thrown in for the sake of needing an offensive insult. Not only does it feel very unprofessional, but it just took me out entirely. On top of that, there was at least one homophobic interaction between the MC and a supporting character that was completely unnecessary. If my my memory serves me right, I want to say the main character was asked to go for a walk to discuss some things, and the MC stated that it “sounded gay” or something along those lines. All around just unnecessary. There are plenty of better ways to express your characters’ morality than this low-bar attempt at checking boxes.
Lastly, the magic system, if you want to call it that, was just too much. And this one I’ll try to be a little more lenient on, because I don’t think I’m the biggest fan of hard magic systems anyways, but this just felt like overkill. When I’ve got 20 minutes of explaining mathematics and science in the most uninteresting way possibly in my SFF, I’m checking out, you lost me. I simply do not care that much. Maybe if the world and characters around that system were better I’d care more, but that has yet to be seen. As the book went on, I just felt like this was a near-blatant Star Wars ripoff with some sprinkles of Dune perhaps (which is potentially just a given since that’s Star Wars already). The “light” that this system is based on is just midichlorians/the force. The “Shadow” are the sith, and “Lightbringers” are basically Jedi. An attempt at adding intergalactic, or at least intragalactic, politics was made. Albeit, it comes across as weak compared to what it’s influenced by.
I’ll be completely honest in saying, that it’s not fair that I listened to this audiobook while in the middle of reading A Song of Ice and Fire. It’s a pretty stark (pun not intended) contrast in quality of work. However, I fully believe this wouldn’t hold up against any other contemporary SFF writer that’s self-published with half as many fans as Shad has at his disposal. Which honestly may be his biggest downfall. His brand of humor, loud criticism, and overall style of content lends itself to a certain type of yes men that won’t be willing to tell you when your shit stinks.
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
-1 star for too much bickering between characters at inappropriate times.
Everything else is good.
Everything else is good.