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4.25 AVERAGE
4.25 AVERAGE
DNF 47%
I was intrigued, like most, with the idea of an African-inspired fantasy, and the little bits of the plot in reviews got me excited - Revenge story! Common man taking on the established world order! Political Intrigue! Dragons! It fell flat in the execution. What went wrong?
- The entire story (as far as I read) was a long training montage. It was like watching Rocky or Karate Kid training sequences amped up to Gladiator levels of violence. And then it went on for 200 pages. I like a good fight sequence, but I don't care to read pages and pages on the angle of a sword swing. To me this read like a myopic high school football player view of the world - practice every day like a maniac and I WILL GET EVERYTHING.
- The main character is a single-minded angerbot. He experiences no growth (except gaining new fighting techniques I guess?). He makes stupid decisions and doesn't learn from them. There's no appeal to him and I struggled to root for his success, because what would he learn from it?
- There are no women. Well, technically there are, but the only interesting one is limited to the prologue. The "love interest" only exists as a foil for the main character and she has no depth or purpose otherwise.
- The challenge of a fight (and there are TONS of fights) seemed to be entirely derived from the physical size of the opponent. I can only assume that the author wanted to really emphasize the underdog-ness of the main, and thus opponents are varying degrees of huge-enormous-gargantuan, and all rippling with muscle. I get that physical mass is critically important in hand-to-hand combat, but the repetitive descriptions of how big the "other guys" always seemed to be bored me.
- Titles and proper names were confusing. Others have mentioned this so I hate to pile on, but I couldn't keep track of what all the officer, noble, or whatever titles meant.
- There are hardly any dragons. They're in the prologue and maybe a two or three other pages. For a book with dragons in the title, it's a bit disingenuous. And then the magic system - it seems really cool at first, but in the context of the story magic becomes another separator for the main, another way he and other common men are held back, treated like nobodies. Which leads me to the worst part...
- It's all a bully comeuppance fantasy. The caste system, magic, physical presence of individuals, it all exists to bully the main down. I suppose so when he climbs above it all it's more dramatic? The non-stop bullying is ridiculous.
- It's culturally icky. The main is part of a culture that invaded and conquered another land, and characters repeatedly refer to the natives as "savages" and the like. Maybe this was intended to be ironic, some sort role reversal to real life history, but it just felt tropey and tone-deaf to me.
The only reason I can think of for this book to have so many 5 star reviews is reader wish fulfillment. We've all been there - nobody thinks we can do it, we're not good enough, we'll never make it, the deck is entirely stacked against us (or so we imagine). But through sheer will and stick-to-itiveness we rise above all the haters. There's really nothing else in this book, so if that's your thing, good for you. It's not for me.
I was intrigued, like most, with the idea of an African-inspired fantasy, and the little bits of the plot in reviews got me excited - Revenge story! Common man taking on the established world order! Political Intrigue! Dragons! It fell flat in the execution. What went wrong?
- The entire story (as far as I read) was a long training montage. It was like watching Rocky or Karate Kid training sequences amped up to Gladiator levels of violence. And then it went on for 200 pages. I like a good fight sequence, but I don't care to read pages and pages on the angle of a sword swing. To me this read like a myopic high school football player view of the world - practice every day like a maniac and I WILL GET EVERYTHING.
- The main character is a single-minded angerbot. He experiences no growth (except gaining new fighting techniques I guess?). He makes stupid decisions and doesn't learn from them. There's no appeal to him and I struggled to root for his success, because what would he learn from it?
- There are no women. Well, technically there are, but the only interesting one is limited to the prologue. The "love interest" only exists as a foil for the main character and she has no depth or purpose otherwise.
- The challenge of a fight (and there are TONS of fights) seemed to be entirely derived from the physical size of the opponent. I can only assume that the author wanted to really emphasize the underdog-ness of the main, and thus opponents are varying degrees of huge-enormous-gargantuan, and all rippling with muscle. I get that physical mass is critically important in hand-to-hand combat, but the repetitive descriptions of how big the "other guys" always seemed to be bored me.
- Titles and proper names were confusing. Others have mentioned this so I hate to pile on, but I couldn't keep track of what all the officer, noble, or whatever titles meant.
- There are hardly any dragons. They're in the prologue and maybe a two or three other pages. For a book with dragons in the title, it's a bit disingenuous. And then the magic system - it seems really cool at first, but in the context of the story magic becomes another separator for the main, another way he and other common men are held back, treated like nobodies. Which leads me to the worst part...
- It's all a bully comeuppance fantasy. The caste system, magic, physical presence of individuals, it all exists to bully the main down. I suppose so when he climbs above it all it's more dramatic? The non-stop bullying is ridiculous.
- It's culturally icky. The main is part of a culture that invaded and conquered another land, and characters repeatedly refer to the natives as "savages" and the like. Maybe this was intended to be ironic, some sort role reversal to real life history, but it just felt tropey and tone-deaf to me.
The only reason I can think of for this book to have so many 5 star reviews is reader wish fulfillment. We've all been there - nobody thinks we can do it, we're not good enough, we'll never make it, the deck is entirely stacked against us (or so we imagine). But through sheer will and stick-to-itiveness we rise above all the haters. There's really nothing else in this book, so if that's your thing, good for you. It's not for me.
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Tau admired it and thought Hadith might be right. Life was about balance. Tau decided he'd work on it.
By the next morning he'd forgotten his decision to live a balanced life. Over the next moon cycle he spent every waking span in the practice yards and every night tossing in his bed. He tried to feel guilty about how distant he was with the rest of the men.
Considering this is military epic fantasy build around vengeance, I was never going to love this, so the fact that I was fully invested in it and (mostly) enjoyed it is actually a win. I have a lot of thoughts about this one and not sure how to tackle them all, so... points it is!
1. Tau is an annoying main character. I rooted for him - mainly because he's the only fully fledged character - but if he were beside me, I would have strangled him before the book ended... well, I guess he would have killed me if I tried...
2. About the character work... I don't mean to say it's badly done. Hadith felt like a person, so did Jayyed and surprisingly, I would say that after Tau the best developed character was Kellen Okar. It's not that Winter doesn't pay any attention to his characters, it's just that you can tell that he's planning to kill most of them so he's keeping his distance from them. Don't get me wrong, he's ruthless in killing them off, but I can't say that I was particularly affected... (Confere with The Fifth Season or Saga or A Game of Thrones, I guess...)
3. My main gripe with this book though, is the fact that I'm not sure I agree with it's message. This book is about bettering yourself through hard work, through no rest, insane training, pushing through every boundary.
I get what the author was trying to accomplish by this narrative but it doesn't work for me.
4. Which smoothly gets us to the fact that this whole world is highly eugenistic. There are castes, the nobles are naturally bigger and stronger than the lessers/commons and there is also the fact that you have to have some noble blood so you could be enraged (=magic can be used on you to make you a better warrior). Honestly, it's this last thing that's just... 🤨 Why would you add this worldbuilding trait if you are trying to prove that eugenics are trash? I still hope it's made up....
Where am I going with this? This type of worldbuilding just makes me want to go in and set the whole system on fire! But Tau doesn't care about the system, he just cares about himself and his vengeance. Which is infuriating...
5. Also, only women in this world can be gifted (=have magic) which is why Omechi have queen and supposedly women are higher in hierarchy than men - which is demonstrated by the fact that women are the ones to propose marriage in this world not the other way around.
The whole worldbuilding didn't catch up to this though... there are only men in military even though the whole society is built around the military and so (almost) all of the queen's advisors are men. There are only four women characters in the whole book and only one of them is truly important and even she doesn't have much page time. (Well, I mean, the queen is also important, but we don't really see her until the end.) The sexism in the army is rampant and disgusting honestly - it's minor in comparison to some other comparable books (I mean, epic fantasy written by men), but it doesn't match up here. We get to know that sex work is also a thing in this world, but we don't get to see if it's changed somehow in relation to the worldbuilding...
From all of this, it's pretty clear that women actually don't have much power in this world - which is completely fine. Having a female monarch doesn't have to mean "matriarchy". But the ambivalence in which it is presented here just doesn't work very well for me. The gender segregation actually doesn't make any sense in this type of setting...
Also, you know, gendered magic, I almost never love that! Explain! How does it work! Is it a chromosome thing? 🤨 Where are the intersex people in that case?!
6. In conclusion to some of the things I said, this book doesn't really portray any disabled characters (there is one with chronic cough) and is very strong on worshiping able bodies. There are three fat characters who are all - nobles, bad guys, insignificant and die quickly. The message here clearly is that getting fat in this world is a privilege and done on the expense of others. Which you know... doesn't have to be the case... I mean, fatphobia and ableism in this type of worldbuilding completely makes sense, but the author doesn't comment on it, he propagates it.
I said nothing positive yet, right...? 🙈
I'll try to remedy that!
7. The narration of the audiobook is masterful, I really loved that! Would recommend!
8. The cover art is also really lovely.
9. I really love how Winters juxtaposed some of the things. He sometimes gave us one chapter from different character and for me this was a great choice!
It's important to tell that Tau is construed as unreliable character, we aren't supposed to stand by him on 100% He makes bad decisions, he judges people wrongly. And this was done very well, in my opinion. Especially,
10. The sex scene was lovely. It was just a bit idealised, but there was enough of the teenage boy left for it to feel realistic and also... feminist.
To wrap this up... as someone who is not fond of fighting scenes, military fantasy and so on... I could have used a bit more editing here. But then clearly, I'm not the intended audience, because there is ton of people who live for reading this stuff. As you can see above, I had a lot of issues with this book, but most of them were actually minor and almost invisible for a "normal reader".
This book very much feels like a debut, when it's sometimes a bit clumsy in piecing some things together, but it's intriguing nonetheless, so... since the next book is supposed to be more political and there seems to be more cultural clashing coming, I'm intrigued and will be picking up the next book!
This book is so well written and I get why it’s loved. This is a soft DNF. I am personally just not super into war/reading about it. It’s so wonderfully unique though.
Very confused. Everyone said it would get better by the end and I would understand the vocab but rn I can't struggle through a book for 200 pages to start enjoying it 🤧😓
adventurous
dark
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
NOOOO I ACCIDENTLY DELEATED THIS ANYWAY ITS A GREAT BOOK CANT WAIT TO READ THE NEXT ONE anyway it was so good and so action packed and I loooooved how NONE of the action felt gratuitous despite there being so damn much of it each action scene felt plot necessary!! That in itself is enough to recommend the book but yea, the whole thing is great on top of that.
adventurous
challenging
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
adventurous
dark
emotional
tense