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A review by jwillis81
Breakers of the Dawn by Zachariah Wahrer
2.0
I picked it up as an impulse purchase after reading the blurb, and I was really looking forward to reading it. Unfortunately, I feel like the promises of a grand-scale, thought-provoking, cross-genre epic got in the way of telling a compelling story and hooking the reader.
Right off the bat, it was very difficult to get into this story because every chapter jumps to another character with another storyline. Just when you feel like you're getting familiar with a character and what their deal is, you get pulled away to a completely different character and his or her storyline. This repeats every single chapter, and it wasn't until I was a quarter of the way through the book that I had any sense of the characters at all, and over halfway through the book before there was any semblance of their stories intertwining.
I do respect the size and scope of the narrative the author is putting together. It's clear that he has spent a considerable amount of time in this universe thinking about all the various nuances and carefully detailing any number of things. The actual execution of the book, though, didn't really hit the mark, precisely because it did feel like it was focused more on the "bigger picture" than on telling a good story with compelling characters.
It's entirely possible that this might be one of those series where, if you stick with it to the end it really pays off and the reader appreciates the extensive worldbuilding that the author put in, but without caring too much about any of the characters and without having a defined narrative arc that I could enjoy and follow along with, this was a miss for me.
Right off the bat, it was very difficult to get into this story because every chapter jumps to another character with another storyline. Just when you feel like you're getting familiar with a character and what their deal is, you get pulled away to a completely different character and his or her storyline. This repeats every single chapter, and it wasn't until I was a quarter of the way through the book that I had any sense of the characters at all, and over halfway through the book before there was any semblance of their stories intertwining.
I do respect the size and scope of the narrative the author is putting together. It's clear that he has spent a considerable amount of time in this universe thinking about all the various nuances and carefully detailing any number of things. The actual execution of the book, though, didn't really hit the mark, precisely because it did feel like it was focused more on the "bigger picture" than on telling a good story with compelling characters.
It's entirely possible that this might be one of those series where, if you stick with it to the end it really pays off and the reader appreciates the extensive worldbuilding that the author put in, but without caring too much about any of the characters and without having a defined narrative arc that I could enjoy and follow along with, this was a miss for me.