Posted by This is my last read for SPFBOX. I saved it for last hoping that I would jive with it! (I have other reviews I need to write and I’m not certain why I’m going out of order. My life is so haphazard right now it’s best not to question things too much.)
With this book we have ourselves an old school fantasy with classic races and tropes – there are elves, dwarves, wizards, zombies, and a wide-ranging epic setting with ass loads of ancient lore. The book kicks off with the murder of our MC’s parents, leaning into the orphan trope. Shortly after the death of their parents there’s a time skip to where they’re a pair of brothers trying to make it in the world killing monsters for pay. It felt kind of episodic for a long time up until about halfway through the book when pieces from the various adventures started to build up an over-arcing plot. Even after that, though, things still felt stop and go as we watched them go on one adventure after another.
Basically, for a lot of the book the two brothers go find a monster that’s been reported of need of dispatch, they kill it, protect the people, and move on to the next job. They aren’t exactly heroes though, not at first. They accidentally kill a room full of kids who they thought were monsters because they had been shifted by a wizard to look like trolls or orcs or something. Their reactions to that and the mother finding them was super muted, like, oh well just killed a whole bunch of kids and their mom found their bodies, whoopsie daisy. Later on their reckless behavior killing monsters leads to some unforeseen consequences and those consequences come home to roost. The two of them were both kind of grey in their own way, and they were actually difficult to tell apart at first, but the longer I read the more differences emerged. Baelin, the older one, tended to have a cooler head while Rawley, the younger one is the more likely of the two to throw a punch. However, they’re both very adept fighters, maybe too adept. At one point the king gets pissed at them for solving the problems his entire army can’t, which makes them feel a bit larger than life.
About halfway through the book the plotting starts to come together as the brothers try to unify all the different nations and peoples of the world to help fight the Big Bad. However, the elves, dwarves, humans, gnomes, and other races are going to drive a hard bargain and it will be difficult to convince them to make friends of old enemies.
I really liked how in depth the world building is here, there’s clearly a ton of thought put into it. There was quite a bit of info dumping though which got a little exhausting when there was too much of it at once. There are also these people called the Wraughtmen who are a cannibal crazy kind of race. I’m not sure if I liked them or not, they were just kind of evil and insane as a culture which doesn’t always sit right with me. I did really like the dwarven culture though, we meet them first and there’s a lot of neat lore that goes with their race. There’s a lot of old school magic and supposedly there’s rules to the magic, it’s even told to the reader in the text that there are rules, but they seem to be very loose.
The pacing is really where this dragged for me, it’s just a really, really long book. I guess I can’t talk since our team nominated one of the longest books in the competition. We all kind of did that this year with a couple exceptions. I really just wanted more fluidity between the adventures, it felt like I was watching a TV show almost with a beginning and and end to a bunch of mini stories within one “season” that was the book.
My rating is a 6.75/10 for SPFBO (which would round up as a final score to 7) but this is not our final score as Kristen is almost done and will have her review and score out shortly š