This book’s greatest strength is also its worst weakness. The author has spent an incredible amount of time and creativity in fabricating an epic fantasy world, rich in placenames, history, politics and above all multiple types of magic, magicians, and magical beings. The pages teem with them, new types in every chapter, with loving descriptions of their ugliness and horrible deeds. Magicians, mages, and seers likewise abound, each sort with a different set of powers and weaknesses.
But there is just too much of everything. Stories are about characters experiencing emotions, and in this book, there are so many people and so many political factions that we have no idea who we are supposed to care about. This makes it difficult to get emotionally involved.
A small problem is the lack of a sense of where anything is in relation to anything else. Because of their powers, magicians bounce from city to mountain to castle with little regard to distance or direction. The reader loses any sense of place or time and stops caring, which makes it difficult to maintain suspense. In a like manner, battles go on and on with wonderful details of actions and powers, but with little sense of growing tension.
As with the first book in the series, I read an Advanced Review Copy, but I don’t think the large numbers of misused words, poor sentence structure, passive voice and point-of-view switches I found will be smoothed out in a final edit.
The second book in a series, this story shows no mercy to anyone who hasn’t read the first book or, like me, did so several years ago. The upside, of course, is that you can enjoy this book just as much if you haven’t read the first one.
A good fantasy tale with two hundred pages of backstory and setting description at the beginning.
(4 / 5)