Posted by This was part of Lynn’s Books grouping, and doesn’t have any feedback yet.
Plot:
Jack is the main character of the book and he’s a half-orc half goblin living in a modern city. His family ran from the Old World to this world, and Jack is trying his best to get by.
The book starts out with a couple murders and Jack was there to witness one of them. An unknown man came to take a family heirloom, killing a woman in the process. He tries to kill Jack as well due to an old feud with his Jacks father, who’s no longer alive.
Jack didn’t know much about his family history, especially not with this man, who’s later known as Sheild, and what he wants with his family heirlooms and why he hates his father so much.
The meat of the book deals with fighting Sheild and his men, and trying to protect his family. It gets pretty intense and a lot of people die, this book was actually more violent than I thought it would be.
Final Score: 7.5/10
Characters:
Jack talks to the audience throughout the book, and you get a lot of his inner thoughts and feelings. He’s sort of sarcastic, he has a decent sense of humor, and tries his best to get things done.
Jack is trying to deal with two sides of his family, his Orc side and his Goblin side, and it’s definitely a challenge for him. He’s actually a decent singer and it comes up a few times in the story.
He likes to read lore about Orcs in things like dungeons and dragons to see what humans think of them. He’s mildly amused about the things humans get right and wrong.
He’s the one who really helps both sides of his family keep their shit together, he helps the goblins when they have eviction problems, and keeps the police off his Orc cousins backs. Hence the name “fixer”, he runs around trying to fix things for other members of his family.
Despite the reputation of Orcs and their love of violence, Jack hadn’t actually killed anyone before – so being thrown into the middle of a serious battle between paladins wanting to kill his family was a change of lifestyle for him.
There are other POV’s as the book goes on, but they don’t take up a large part of the story.
Final Score: 7.5/10
World Building:
- The human world is mostly oblivious to the presence of Orcs and Goblins. Jack has to use a doctor who treats him like a dog, literally, because no other doctors will acknowledge the presence of other species besides humans
- Elves are a thing, one of them is tagging along with Jack for most of the book. She’s pretty badass. She’s also black, not a “dark elf”, just a black elf. I can’t remember ever reading about that before.
- Orcs have something called War Cryers, they have a special ability to rouse Orcs into battle mode when they sing. It sounds like it’s a form of innate magic in some orcs but not others.
- Wizards can open doors from one world to the other
- Gods are real, take human form, and interact with people
Final Score: 7/10
Pacing/Prose/Tone:
It took me a little bit to get into the book, but that was mostly because I’m not used to books where the characters talk to the audience. I hadn’t read one of those in a long time, but once I got into it the pacing was well done. This was one of those books where the more I read the more I got into it.
I’ve actually read another book by this author, and if I didn’t know it was by him I wouldn’t have guessed which shows nice versatility.
The tone wasn’t overly bleak because the main character’s tone was pretty light, pretty sarcastic and not all doom and gloom. However, there were a lot of fights and a lot of deaths.
Writing Final Score: 7.5/10
Pacing Final score: 9/10
Originality:
The main character was very unique, there aren’t a ton of books from non-human POV’s, and even less of Orc/goblin POV’s. I liked his culture and his personality.
I don’t read a ton of urban fantasy that was presented in the way this was, and the narration style where the MC is speaking to the audience isn’t something I come across much either.
Final Score: 8.5/10
Audience:
- Non human protag
- characters aware of audience
- urban fantasy
- a lot of magic
- a lot of action
- gods in human form
- multiple worlds/portals to worlds
Final Score: 47/60 or 7.8/10 or 4 stars on goodreads
One comment