Alie Brown

It has to be said: this is a lethany

Revisado: 01-21-25

Can you imagine a fight that extends over several hundred pages of text? No? Too long? Now imagine many fights. This is basically this book. It's so long that those hundred of pages are interspersed with hundred of pages of non-linear backstory. Brandon earns the title "Bringer of agonies" for writing this one.

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Masterful story and masterful storytelling

Revisado: 07-18-23

This is a work that engages from the first to the last page, the story is very good, the narration is superb, the characters are generally likeable, the world-building is plain good.

One little detail I liked very much is that the main character's character development happens off-page between the last chapter and the epilogue, when he accepts to work for the king. I like this detail because is one of the ways in which the work deviates from the canon of "there have to be character development"..

Also, the romance part was a blow of fresh air, because it was relatively light on drama, and it is M to M which makes it very sweet.

My minor gripes with this work:

- There are too few deviations from the sword-and-dagger genre. It's a masterful execution of an old recipe. But the recipe is old and well known, and sometimes that leads to boring predictability.

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How to write the book you hate

Revisado: 08-10-22

Great advice for any aspiring writer of thrillers. I can’t stand those, all seem written by the same recipe given here of throwing somebody in a pit full of crocodiles and watching to see what happens.

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Space-odisey re-written

Revisado: 04-05-22

Beware of writers who have nothing new to write. I can’t understand how anybody would give this book a good review.

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Goblins, elves, prelates

Revisado: 03-18-22

The good:

The work is really well edited.

The bad:

- All the emperor does is to arrange marriages, or try to avoid arranging marriages.
- There is only one character, the emperor. Everybody else is just an outline.

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Just another wizardling-coming-of-age-story

Revisado: 08-18-20

I swallowed 6 hours of this book during which nothing happened.

Things which are WRONG with this story:

- It sounds like Patrick Rofus's "The name of the Wind", up to having dangerous and capricious Fae people, *and* the growing up, and the long biographical chapters. The book is, in so far as I read, just a long biography of a wizardling.
- Also, duly noted the "book One" in the cover: by my suspicion, there is more biography in the coming books. I also suspect this book will have a cheap, utterly unsatisfying end right to hook me into the next one. I'm probably wrong, but hey, after six hours reading, I couldn't know better.
- The medieval setting, right down to feudal lords and poor villages and central European winters with some snow, and sword and leather. Is it that hard too think about more interesting settings?
- Choppy world-building. Well, maybe that's unfair, since I *only* read for six hours. Maybe there will be more world-building in book three and seven.

Author writes well otherwise, he has nailed down all the aspects of story-telling, but his cookie-cutter adherency to story crafting is just sad.

There is an audience for these books I suppose, but they are not my cup of tea, got it in an error. Books like these should be tagged with "another-wizardling-coming-of-age-story" the same way we tag "urban fantasy" and "adult erotica".

Tim Gerard Reynolds gave a great performance while reading, as always, but I could hear his mental cussing for having to read another of these, and the regret for his choices in life.

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Too much of a cliff-hanger

Revisado: 12-01-19

Better wait until the entire series is written... it will be years needle the next book is out :-(

History is Brandom Sanderson-good otherwise.

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Science fiction at its best ...

Revisado: 05-04-19

E. A. Hooper gets the fundamentals right:

- Characters and some character development
- World building, including world monsters and world events
- Balanced fights
- Well connected plot

which is all used to explore the what if of infinite time to enjoy life and to explore the condition of being human. I wish there were more authors writing elevating books like this one and that books like this one made it to the best-seller list more often, instead of all the incongruent post-apocalyptic gloomy c**p ala Stephen King and George R. R. Martin.

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Science fiction at its best ...

Revisado: 05-04-19

E. A. Hooper gets the fundamentals right:

- Characters and some character development
- World building, including world monsters and world events
- Balanced fights
- Well connected plot

which is all used to explore the what if of infinite time to enjoy life and to explore the condition of being human. I wish there were more authors writing elevating books like this one and that books like this one made it to the best-seller list more often, instead of all the incongruent post-apocalyptic gloomy c**p ala Stephen King and George R. R. Martin.

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Too much drama, too little story :-(

Revisado: 11-08-18

I was skipping two chapters at a time, few elements of the story changed in the skips. The book is a long and slow chase where the protagonists get to have darker and darker days.

Characters well built, but they take way too much space.

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