Reviews - Empire of Silence

3.27k reviews for:

Empire of Silence

Christopher Ruocchio

3.98 AVERAGE

natyan2592's review against another edition

3.0

adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

michellegmc's review against another edition

4.25

adventurous challenging dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

gdomecus33's review against another edition

1.5

adventurous dark reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

This book is a HUGE dune ripoff. Im not even gonna bother to list all the things it rips off because ill be here for hours. Now i love dune so youd think that would be a good thing but it is just such a bad copy. Hadrian is not very compelling, extremely passive and difficult to root for. It doesnt help that this book is very slow and constantly has Hadrian drop in bits where hes like “oh yea and i would go on to do this cool thing or this person i met went on to betray me” and then instantly go back to the slow paced “drama” of his time on emesh. I read another review that mentioned how this book is just an insanely long prologue and that really sums things up quite nicely. I really thought i would love this book and there is some interesting pieces in this world but man what a disappointment this book was. I will probably give book 2 a chance but if it continues in this vain Im gonna have to DNF that.

Ok i just read some more reviews and saw a bunch of things that were stupid as hell that dropped my rating even more (the inherent sexism of the cielcins language, the “prose” of this book, lack of any relevant female characters that exist outside of a romantic “foil” for Hadrian, the fact that it rips of dune so aggressively i completely forgot to mention how much it also rips off name of the wind)