Posted by This was my first SPFBO read so it may as well be my first review, too! I started with this one because it was recently recommended to me, I just hadn’t had time to read it yet. So, it was just sitting there loaded on my kindle waiting for me.
We start with a school teacher, Zercien, who is sort of a squirrely disorganized mess of a person in my opinion. He has a haphazard way of going through life, showing up late to teach class more often than not, leading to bribery for their silence. After all, if the kids tell on him to their parents, who are all rich merchants, it will get back to the school and he could be fired. He lives a fairly boring life. He’s never left his town, because what would be the point of that? He’s about 25 years old, has a fiancé, and is living a scholarly life and that suits him just fine.
Well, joke’s on him because he gets possessed by a ghost of a general who’s all like, “let’s sign ourselves up for the army during a time of brutal warfare with multiple countries!” Zercien doesn’t know what this entity is, why it’s taken control of him, or how to get rid of it. He’s helpless as the ghost takes over and signs his name on the dotted line to serve in the military despite having no skill with a sword or military inclinations. The story basically follows his journey through the military complete with training montages, supernatural powers gained, and a new found-family military vibe. The plot did expand a bit as the world expanded but to go much more into it could be considered a spoiler.
I personally would be far, far, far more freaked out about the voice in my head/thing that takes over my body. This guy is a teacher and a bookworm but for some reason he doesn’t turn to literature to try and figure this out. I can’t recall him going to scholars, or asking around either vaguely or directly if anyone had heard of a condition like this. So, to put his condition in a sum, he gets massive headaches out of nowhere, then he sees fog swirl in and around him and others around him, it usually fills the room he’s standing in (no one else sees this fog) this is usually followed by being possessed by a ghost that takes over his actions completely. What’s a little odd to me is I didn’t see a ton of emotional reaction to this. Like, he was freaked out, he’s not happy about it, but I would be wigging out and driving to find an answer. Even when he’s shown that magic is coming back into the world and people are practicing again (which is deeply frowned upon) he doesn’t seem to make many connections. I did find him to be a pretty relatable character, at least to me, because I’d have no desire to go enlist in the military either. His character changes and grows a lot and by the end of the book he’s very different.
Because there were so many POV characters there were also a lot of side characters that surrounded those POVs. I felt those secondary characters needed a little more depth. I often felt like the side characters were there for plot points, just to move things along and felt less like a fully developed character. It’s hard to do with so many coming and going from the page, and overall it’s a fairly small complaint.
I have a hard time coming up with novel imagery in my head, so giving me reference points that I can pull from is hugely helpful to creating a head movie. I struggled a little with the prose because it relies heavily on straight descriptions of items and people relying on my brain to come up with a picture of what’s being described, which it doesn’t do very well, lol. This is something that’s completely personal so your mileage may vary. I also tend to prefer a more modern dialogue between characters. I sometimes have issues settling into characters that speak in a way I never would in real life. I’m mostly referring to word choice and how dramatically people phrase things. “Make ready, we depart on my order! Come with me, lad!” Just as an example. Again, your mileage may vary here, I know people who don’t like things to sound modern at all and would be thrown off by what I prefer.
The pacing was pretty decent, although I did feel it slowed down a little bit in the middle. It’s roughly 440 pages and so it’s neither a short book nor is it a chonk, it hits a nice middle ground that many people prefer. What helped with the pacing was the alternation between fight scenes/battles and scenes that focused on world building or character building. I do feel like there’s a nice ebb and flow in that respect and that it changes over at the right moments. There’s almost as much political plotting and backstabbing as there is battling monsters so there’s a bit of something for everyone in that regard. What slowed the pacing down for me was the introduction to so many new characters. It would take me a little bit to orient myself to the character and care about what each new person was doing and why they mattered in the story.
There’s a fair degree of world building in this, and I appreciated how it was done. There are multiple kingdoms and the reader knows all about the relationships between them since there are POVs from each culture. This creates a feel of a wide-ranging and epic scope for the background and plot, and a feeling of a lived-in world that’s well thought out. The magic in this world is known as “pariah arts” and one of the other POVs has a mother who was capable of doing magic but then had to flee because his father disowned her. The magic has an old school feel to it and is not governed by any clear rules like a Sanderson magic system kind of thing, it’s got floating sorcerers, spells that turns people to dust, and other hand wavey magic things like that. There’s also a decent amount of blood and gore and just things I’d call “gross shit.” The ghosts that present themselves to Zercien will have maggots falling out of their eyes, things like that.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with this and would recommend it to people looking for an old school epic fantasy with a reluctant hero.
This book is marked as safe for this round!