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A review by themanfromdelmonte
A Touch of Light by Thiago Abdalla
2.0
Over long. It's not a good sign when the first 11 pages are taken up with dramatis personæ. That hints that there's going to be a lot of flipping back to the front to find out who's who. I can't be bothered with that, not unless there's a solid milieu underneath it (see the Rook & Rose trilogy for what I mean) and there's not much sense of that here. There's a lot of adventuring and broken heroes and killing, but not much sense of an actual world with living breathing people in it.
The Rook & Rose books are a useful comparison because this is also a tripartite plot with three characters to follow. However, unlike Grey, Vargo and Ren, the protagonists trotting around Nadežra, Adrian, Lynn and Nesha don't interact, so you can't use connected bits of plot to start to bind everything together. They carry their own individualistic baggage with them so no sooner have you started to work out who Addo is and why she's important than we're back with Adrian or Lynn.
There's the hint of a plot wherein people steal life from around them and this prolongs their lives at the expense of other living things.
Then there's the Rage, which seems to be some kind of zombie contagion. Cue hordes of crazies with insatiable bloodlust who don't feel pain. *sigh*
One curious plot event during Adrian's sea voyage has the water boy confusing drinking water with sea water and it implies that Adrian has drunk sea water. I'm sorry but there's no way anyone would mistake the two, let alone actually drink sea water. Very odd.
By the end of the book, Adrian has been forced into a marriage his father planned all along and it's cost a good few lives to get him there. Lynn is back with the elite fighting force she abandoned because ... reasons. Nesha seems to have some version of the Rage under control but by now there were lots of bodies and I'd ceased to care who'd killed who (there were so many)
Ultimately rather tedious.
The Rook & Rose books are a useful comparison because this is also a tripartite plot with three characters to follow. However, unlike Grey, Vargo and Ren, the protagonists trotting around Nadežra, Adrian, Lynn and Nesha don't interact, so you can't use connected bits of plot to start to bind everything together. They carry their own individualistic baggage with them so no sooner have you started to work out who Addo is and why she's important than we're back with Adrian or Lynn.
There's the hint of a plot wherein people steal life from around them and this prolongs their lives at the expense of other living things.
Then there's the Rage, which seems to be some kind of zombie contagion. Cue hordes of crazies with insatiable bloodlust who don't feel pain. *sigh*
One curious plot event during Adrian's sea voyage has the water boy confusing drinking water with sea water and it implies that Adrian has drunk sea water. I'm sorry but there's no way anyone would mistake the two, let alone actually drink sea water. Very odd.
By the end of the book, Adrian has been forced into a marriage his father planned all along and it's cost a good few lives to get him there. Lynn is back with the elite fighting force she abandoned because ... reasons. Nesha seems to have some version of the Rage under control but by now there were lots of bodies and I'd ceased to care who'd killed who (there were so many)
Ultimately rather tedious.