This book is a wide-ranging and rather loose-jointed epic fantasy with so much variety in species, settings, and magical powers that it lacks cohesiveness. Characters and even whole species appear and disappear at the whim of the author, and readers are prevented from forming an emotional grasp of the most important conflict of the story: the internal development of the main character, Wren. The parts that I found most enjoyable were where we spent large amounts of time with her, watching her actions, her feelings, and her inner conflicts.
I also appreciated the author’s deft use of comic relief through secondary characters, particularly The Wastrel and his donklet, Pollux. Another comic turn that appears regularly is reference to ghastly food products with equally stomach-churning recipes. None of these asides intrude into the serious conflicts of the story.
On the other hand, I was distracted by the use of author interjections like “Little did he know…” “But he would only find out later,” and “She did not know how this small decision would impact the future.” This outdated technique attempts to create suspense but reminds readers that there is an author manipulating our emotions and telling us only what she wants us to know.
One challenge for the writer of epic fantasy is the necessity of switching point of view to several different characters. Too much of this removes readers from emotional contact with any single personality. Thus, it is important to maintain focus on the chosen POV character at any given time and avoid random jumps from the head of one character to another in the middle of a chapter.
This novel teems with a variety of speaking voices and dialects, which helps to differentiate characters and adds to the richness of the setting. The stream of warped versions of present-day words (donklet, apertifer, fruck, ‘shrooms) adds to the humour.
Unfortunately, the power of this creativity is diluted by actual word usage errors in the narrative writing, (“lude” instead of “lewd,” mixing up “lie, lay, laid”)
The ending does as good a job as possible of wrapping up the conflicts of this book while at the same time keeping the pot boiling for the next novel in the series.
A character-driven main story, obscured by editing errors and creativity run amok.
This review was originally published on Reedsy Discovery