A review by aiight
Steel Crow Saga by Paul Krueger

2.0

The story had some heart but was hurt by the ubiquitous clichés. The characters had potential for some serious development but none of them quite attained it, and the book probably needed the removal of one or more of the POV characters so that more time could be spent on the struggles of the others. It just did not feel like the background work was present to develop the soldier with serious trauma, or the smooth-talking thief with commitment issues, or the young leader trying to fill his parent's shoes, and so on. I also did not care for the use of stand-in nations for China, Japan, Korea, India, and others, since it felt like a way for the author to avoid spending any time on serious cultural development of the world. Just mention something recognizably (or stereotypically) Japanese, for instance, and ta-da your reader can use their own whole picture of Japan to apply to this fictional nation. That being said, I read it to the end because I was invested enough to want to see what happened, pretty good for a second book.