Posted by This is a seriously ambitious book. There are a bunch of POV characters and each one of them has a set of side characters that are surrounding them. Most of the characters come from different cultures and different species from the other POVs creating viewpoints from many vantage points across this world. I think this would appeal to people who like classic epic fantasy with loose magic rather than a rigid magic system.
The book opens with Frieda, one of the five or six different POV characters, as she discovers a dead man by the side of the road. She can tell right away that he’s a “Seared” man, which is someone who has been punished for practicing forbidden magic, marked with classic all-white eyes indicating they are cut off from magic. He didn’t die from old age, or as a result of the Searing, someone or something murdered him and Frieda is going to try and find out.
Argent is a mage/druid who uses forest magic, and in his opening chapter he’s performing a ritual that goes wrong. Something dark tried to interfere with the ritual and he ended up needing to use forbidden magic to try and combat whatever was trying to disrupt the ritual. He’s been practicing forbidden magic for a while now in secret, trying to learn every possible advantage for the challenges to come. He thinks there’s a war on the horizon and he wants his daughter, Saren, to be prepared. Saren is willful and young, but her childhood is ending. He needs to teach those who surround his daughter how to use every kind of magic to keep her safe.
Saren, mentioned above, is also a POV character. She’s around 15-16 years old and fits fully into that stereotype of disobedient teenager. She’s had a best friend her whole life, he’s a dude name Daphid (sp?), and they used to grow up wrestling and playing with each other, but now that they’re older their physical differences are starting to become exaggerated and Daphid is worried he could hurt Saren. This really pisses her off at first. Saren doesn’t want to be thought of as any different than anyone else, despite the entire village thinking she’s destined to be a Queen. Saren is an impulsive and immature character that does lead to a lot of dangerous situations. She deliberately does the exact opposite of what her father asks her to, and participates in a Pelkin ceremony (the Pelkin are a water-based race with gills) where she dives into a pond or lake and collects eels with her other best friend. The team with the most eels wins. Fairly simple. However, this ceremony goes horrifically wrong and she ends up getting wrapped into her destiny a little early.
Sal is a noble lady — kind of. She’s a different kind of noble lady. She hails from the swamps and she’s a rough and tumble hunter kind of character. She has lady servants who dress her, but she hates needing to be pampered and bathed and presented to court. She’s described as only happy when out in the wilds. She’s expected to marry someone she can’t stand but it’s not a done deal yet at the start of her chapters. This princeling she’s expected to marry is the literal worst. He doesn’t hunt which is appalling. His hands are smooth because he doesn’t work. He’s dressed in fancy clothes and seems like a weak person, in her opinion. He doesn’t even have a bonded animal and her father expects her to marry this dude who lives underground with his strange magic and culture? Fuck that, she thinks to herself.
So, a quick note about pacing, after Sal’s chapter I was really hoping we’d loop back around to one of the preexisting characters instead of being introduced to a new character because I was having a hard time keeping up with everything that was going on. Most of these characters are not connected to each other and they’re all from different parts of the world so it was a little stop and go the first five chapters.
Chapter 6 also introduced character 6, Borto. He’s exploring abandoned caves which were once bustling villages but now are dusty and forgotten, buried in the mountains. I was a little overwhelmed by the time I got to his chapter, and he honestly seems like kind of an ass, so he didn’t register much to me until I came back to him a few times. He’s trying to gain forbidden knowledge from a land where the natives are unhappy that he’s poking around and messing with the dead. He doesn’t seem to care at all how they feel and just keeps poking around for more magic words while fucking the women there and then disrespect what they ask him not to do with their artifacts. He pokes around and finds out later, though.
Finally with chapter 7 we got back to Frieda, a familiar character instead of starting all over again for a seventh time. From here the pacing got better for me. However, This is a long book, there’s a large foundation being built during the first half of the book and so things weren’t exactly fast paced for a while, and it’s never all that fast even at the end. This entire book feels like one long build up for a wild book 2. There are definitely action scenes in this book, and scenes that go by fast and kept me glued to the scene. There’s a poisoning of the world creating thorns and thorn monsters. Shit that just rips through dozens of characters at once and leaves a horrifying mess behind. These thorn creatures are a plague of things to come and they pop up every once in a while to cause chaos and bloodshed. You watch as each of the characters realizes that something’s wrong with the world and fucked up shit is on the horizon as they encounter these thorn monsters.
The world building is intricate but not overwhelming. There are a lot of small details you can breeze through that also breathe in life to the world. It’s just small snippets here and there of little things that matter to the people of the world that make it feel nuanced and lived in, without weighing the reader down with an info dump. There’s a little bit of exposition as the characters think to themselves about certain rituals or cultural issues but they’re brief and relevant. There’s a bunch of different races in this world and each of them have their own way of doing things, viewing the world, and we get to see a character basically from each viewpoint which added to how in depth everything felt.
I finished this book and so it’s being marked as safe!