Relic Hunters and a Young Mage

This book follows two separate plotlines that interact. In one, relic hunters are trying to find a dangerous relic. In the other, a young mage faces of a variety of dangers that put both his and his younger brother’s lives in danger.

The novel is written with a fair amount of humor, especially between the Knight-Questor Zoya and her cousin Yan, who is helping her find the relic. Sarn, the young mage, has a gravitas that one doesn’t expect to find in a young teenage character. He is genuinely concerned about his little brother, Miren, and his love and care for the 7-year-old come right off the page. This series is related to another of the author’s, Curse Breaker. I wasn’t aware of this when I chose the book from the book review site. At that site, the book blurb stated that this was the start of a new series. I wouldn’t call that entirely accurate; at Amazon, the subtitle says that it is book 6 of the Curse Breaker series, and the inside of the book calls it also the Divergent Heroes series (with two more books scheduled). This book is certainly part of the greater world of the Curse Breaker series. The author states in the front that this book can be read as a standalone. As someone who hasn’t read the other series, I can say that this book is a little confusing, like I was missing key information about the world of the book that would have made reading this one a little easier.

The book seemed to have more than the average number of issues with grammar, punctuation, and usage. As is often typical in books, commas were problematic and not just in the usual ways. Commas weren’t correctly used on both sides of an interrupter or when needed to clarify meaning at times.

This book had one of the oddest beginnings that I have ever seen. After the standard table of contents and general information about the author’s other series (and the like), there was this strange—I’m not even sure what to call it—prologue/marketing pitch. It is supposedly written by a character from the Curse Breaker series named Ran, who is the son of Sarn, the boy mage in this particular story. In this multiple page section, Ran describes the author of the book as his father’s Scribe, enters a portal into this book’s world, and interacts briefly with some characters in it as well as a few others. If this is the setup of the book, I see one giant plot hole: How can Sarn tell the Scribe what happened in the relic hunter storyline. As to the marketing pitch, books in the Curse Breakers series are mentioned with links as is the author’s newsletter. Frankly, it was rather bizarre and off-putting. In fact, if I hadn’t given my word to review it, I might have stopped right there.

If you are familiar with the other series of in this world, you will probably find it to be an interesting one that tells you some of Sarn’s boyhood. If you aren’t familiar with this world, you might find this book confusing, but the humor and characters are fun to read about once you get past that first bizarre prologue/marketing pitch.

Noble Warrior Protects Innocent

This is a sprawling tale of a warrior who finds a young person in need of protection due to a great secret. The book opens with a compelling scene of life and death and then a series of flashbacks before getting to the story proper. I liked that the author just started with a scene in the protagonist’s life, not doing an information dump to tell us about the complex world of the story. Instead, he puts us right in the shoes of a soldier who is soon to be tested. We can understand being placed in a difficult situation, so it evokes empathy.

If you prefer your fantasy to be of the fighting variety, you might be disappointed. While there is some of that, the book moves slowly and feels more like a character study of the warrior, especially in the earlier pages, and the young person, as we are coming to understand the forces that shape them. Character slowly unfolds. Foreshadowing is used to significant effect. I appreciated that the protagonist is a man of principle and honor even when it is not easy for him; he is not just one who obeys commands or follows orders.

The author also has an appealing and easy to read a writing style—which I appreciate after having read some books that do not—so that even though this is a longer tale, it’s easy to go along with the journey.

Almost a Parody of the Genre

After a prologue that is meant to tease, we meet Ava, who is the heroine of the story. She is awakening after a nightmare. Ava is supposedly a simple village girl, but she is soon discovered to be Enarie’s light, a chosen person who will help chase away the darkness. The story soon becomes one where protectors try to bring this girl to a place where she will be safe from the bad guys, who are pursuing them.

Why was this girl chosen, and what darkness will she have to face?

At times, the author writes with a lyrical fluidity that is evocative of fantastical time and place. At other times, however, the word choice seems overblown, almost like a parody of the genre. Do people really “beseech” and give “mighty tugs”? As is often the case in the fight between good versus evil in stories like this, the good are too pure and the evil too abhorrent. A little light in shadow and vice versa makes for a more realistic contrast between the two.

I had other issues with language in this book. The author uses far too many exclamation points both in dialogue and in the narrative sections. As a beta reader friend of mine once said, are your characters really that excited? The author also used a Lot of Capitalization for what could be Normal Words, and that is distracting. Many of the made-up words in this world are single words that have an apostrophe within them. This is one of my absolute pet peeves about fantasy writing. Yes, worldbuilding requires new words, but that’s not how you use an apostrophe–says this sometimes cranky freelance copyeditor. It would be one thing if they always fell, say, between parts of the word where the combinations of vowels would make pronunciation difficult for you to understand, but that is not the case here. Let me give you a few examples: Ar’kath, Tri’Gores, Lae’lora, Ellie’dew, Thy’acarr, and Ra’dinyus.

There are a couple of other oddities in this text. One that happened within the first few pages that made me go, huh? Ava is describing getting up after the nightmare, and she is feeling hot, sweaty, and parched after thrashing about in the bed. Here is the actual line that gave me pause: “As she drank, steam lifted from her skin with a hiss.” Oh, my! Is the poor girl about to burst into flames? As a woman of a certain age, I appreciate that sweat happens, but merciful heavens, I don’t think that skin can steam and actually hiss because a person is overheated. Another issue is that, even though this book was supposedly professionally edited, there are fourteen occurrences of a misspelling of haste as hastee. There were also a few missing spaces.

I felt that there needed to be more conflict besides what was going on with the bad guys, some internal group conflict that would keep the journey more interesting. There were minor conflicts, but they were quickly resolved. The book is very long, and as it is repetitive in parts, I believe that the entire text could have been tightened to make the story more impactful.