Here are some of my most loved and hated characters in the book. Even at that I can’t help loving them and hope the author doesn’t kill off all my favorites. When a fantasy book has lots of characters, it’s scary because that means not all of them will make it. The author made it easy to understand by starting each chapter with the character’s name whose POVs are about to be read as a chapter title. The book is written in third person multiple POVs of the MCs, which I admit are a lot, but not up to that of Malazan. The world is really big with lots of kingdoms. The depiction is nicely done, and this is a debut novel of the author. To say the world-building is great is an understatement. Even with all those, the action is still present with perfectly depicted battle scenes. There is religion, which is a major factor in fantasy, myths, prophecies, friendship, family, politics, you name them, all in this book. So that makes the beginning of the book quite slow, but since it’s the first book in the series, it is understandable. Some fantasy books start with a bang then backstory of the main character, others say a little about the Mcs backstory in the middle of the book, etc., but John Gwynne started the book with the MCs as teens, how their life, family, the environment is going to contribute to their future (don’t worry is not YA-ish). The author uses a very rare storytelling style in this book. What I love most in fantasy (epic adult fantasy, to be precise) is its originality and the way the authors play at words. This book turned out way better than I thought it would.

You know you’ve read a great book when you can’t stop thinking about it and imagining all the different scenarios for the next book.

Malice john gwynne series