1/5 stars
Synopsis
Warning! This section contains spoilers, if you would like to avoid these spoilers, jump to the review below.
I didn’t finish this book. I made it to the halfway point, then gave up.
The book started with Kagen waking up, suffering from a hangover. He realized that he could hear the sounds of battle, and he could see smoke. He struggled to get up, and get moving, but he was really hampered by the hangover. He soon realized that it was a full invasion, and he fought his way to the palace. He had sworn an oath to protect the empress and her children. Once he reached the palace, however, he discovered that the children were already dead, butchered by the invaders. He continued through the palace and found his parents fighting and dying as they tried to protect the dying empress. Kagen realized he was damned because he wasn’t able to fulfill his oath of protecting the royal family.
Kagen then sees the invading Witch-king enter the palace.
Kagen blacked out, and when he woke up he didn’t know how he got out of the palace. He was in a field, and he then had a strange dream. Kagen ran across an old friend who told him his quest for revenge was doomed to failure.
He then started to drown himself in wine, because that was the only thing that helped his grief. He traveled the defeated empire to see how bad things were. Kagen became a drunk plagued by blackouts as he wandered the land. He helped the women he came across who were about to be brutalized by soldiers.
Kagen then bumped into someone he knew. This person recruited him to be a thief.
Kagen and the thief acquaintance then went and slaughtered any enemy soldiers they could find. They didn’t do much thieving…so why do they call themselves thieves?
And then apparently Cthulhu is in this book? He was mentioned at the 56% mark.
Review
Kagen’s character arc in the beginning reminded me of the movie Zorro. I enjoyed the fight scenes because they were well written, and the beginning of the book had a lot of emotion, which was nice. The beginning of the book was well done. I hated what happened because it was awful, but it was well written.
And then there was the rest of it.
The book had frequent point of view shifts to random characters. These characters didn’t really seem to contribute much to the story. They were just…there. I found myself skimming over those parts because I didn’t care.
The book started to drag after the first little bit, when Kagen became a drunk. It was just him having blackouts, getting drunk over and over, and killing enemy soldiers.
The Witch-king was supposed to be a powerful, scary guy. But he didn’t seem that scary. He just gave orders and reassured the conquered people that he wasn’t a tyrant, that the conquerors weren’t going to take their property or commit atrocities. His “justice” for the people who committed crimes? He condemned that person to death, all of his family to death, and prison for his descendants for three or four or five generations. That seemed excessive. And it lost its power/impact for the reader after the fifth time it happened. And as for not letting his soldiers commit atrocities? The Witch-king as a ruler was an utter failure. There are so many instances where there were towns destroyed and inhabitants slaughtered, women and children raped to death. There were a lot of mentions of rape.
One of the random POV shifts was to a young girl. And she was running away from the city with her many times removed cousin. She couldn’t stop thinking about how she liked the cousin and hoped they would become more than friends. I stopped reading after there was a sex scene with those two. Them being romantically involved with each other didn’t make any sense to me and I don’t like reading stuff like that.
This book’s blurb claims it is a dark fantasy. Sure, it’s dark. But when the dark stuff is repeated over and over again, it loses its impact. I can only read about destroyed towns, crucified people, and raped women so many times before I just skip it.
Nothing happened in the book to advance the story after Kagen started drinking, and I gave up trying to force myself to read it. I did skip to the end, just to see what happens. And apparently the Witch-king was Kagen’s brother who had been gone for years. For some reason.
I was really disappointed. The author just seemed to waffle on in order to get as high a word count as possible. Disappointing.
Fireheart Books 