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A review by jefffrane
The Fell Sword by Miles Cameron
4.0
Although I enjoyed The Red Knight enormously for its world-building and storytelling, I sat on The Fell Sword for several years without reading it. Like the first novel in the series, it's a fat tale packed with characters but it's far more of an alternative history than fantasy, although there is plenty of magic. There are a number of powerful wizard-y types and a tremendous amount of martial information--weapons, strategies, armor--because the author is obsessive enough on the subject to spend a good deal of his own time in medieval reenactment. There is far less attention given to The Wild, the creature-filled world outside the settled world of humans than in the first book. I was several hundred pages in before I thought I had a comfortable understanding of which of the massive cast of characters I was following at that moment, because subchapters jump from one duke to the next king to the next castle at a dizzying rate, and every character has a plan or a scheme or is busy interfering with someone else's plan and they are all connected. Somehow. By the end of the book, very little has been resolved.
There were times when I would have been happier to have skipped over much of the detail on what people were wearing or why but it would be too likely to then miss a moment that would actually mean something 20 pages on. Where Cameron skimps on description is with his creatures of The Wild. I know some of them are scary-looking but after more than 1000 pages I have only the vaguest notion what a boggle might be. He borrows heavily from actual place names, changing a vowel or two, and this can add to some confusion about where places are in relation to others particularly in terms of distance.
All of which makes the book sound like mush and yet I was caught up with the characters throughout and look forward to reading the next volume. I'm probably not going to wait years to do so.
There were times when I would have been happier to have skipped over much of the detail on what people were wearing or why but it would be too likely to then miss a moment that would actually mean something 20 pages on. Where Cameron skimps on description is with his creatures of The Wild. I know some of them are scary-looking but after more than 1000 pages I have only the vaguest notion what a boggle might be. He borrows heavily from actual place names, changing a vowel or two, and this can add to some confusion about where places are in relation to others particularly in terms of distance.
All of which makes the book sound like mush and yet I was caught up with the characters throughout and look forward to reading the next volume. I'm probably not going to wait years to do so.