A review by marie_mn
The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan

adventurous dark mysterious tense

2.0

I enjoyed the first book in this series. It’s a deeply atmospheric and kind of dark fantasy. The world building was nicely done, I liked our little group of characters and the trials and tribulations they had to go through in The Justice of Kings. So naturally I was excited to continue this story, and it started out good enough, the audiobook narrator was really great. Sadly, that was about the only thing I liked. The plot was just a mess imo, and then the ‘romance’ happened, and it went downhill from there. 

I’m going to get into it below, so if you don’t want to be spoiled, don’t continue reading. 

 

Spoilers 

In the first book, Helena falls in love with someone who then dies soon after. Now this second book picks up not long after the first one (a few months maybe) and I didn’t find it believable at all for her to already develop feelings for someone else when she was still mourning this other guy like yesterday. 

But I could have overlooked that (especially because it isn’t romance focused at all, it’s just a minor subplot). Had that someone not been Vonvalt! The guy who saved her from the streets when she was like 17 or whatever and then employed her to give her a way out of poverty and homelessness. He is her boss and mentor, also way older than her, like he could be her father. There is such an imbalance in power here, it comes across as gross and creepy, not romantic. Also, there was some talk about him exercising self-control for a while and honestly, I don’t even want to think about it any further, like wtf? 

Tell me this was written by a man without telling me..