The Goblin Emperor – A Short Reign

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51n8zxqxzclIf you are engaged in the fantasy genre, chances are that you have heard of Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor before. This stand-alone novel about court intrigue is a popular recommendation from a number of respectable reviewers and is considered by many to be a modern classic. However, I don’t trust anything I haven’t read myself, so I set aside some time this week to dive into this relatively short novel to see if my feelings match those of the general reviewer populace. Turns out that The Goblin Emperor is indeed a good book, but I also found myself noticing a lot of problems under the hood that kept it from achieving true greatness.

First, let’s discuss the plot quickly. The Goblin Emperor follows the story of Maia, an 18-year-old half-goblin/half-elf prince who is living in exile imposed by his father, the emperor. An airship carrying his dad and three older brothers goes down, killing all of them, and suddenly making Maia the man in charge. He is retrieved from exile, forced into a court with no training that he knows nothing about, and is expected to rule a land that is anything but calm. Amidst all the swirling court intrigue, Maia also learns that the accident that killed his father and brothers was no accident, and launches a murder investigation to discover the source of the treachery.

Other than these basics, which can almost completely be found on the back of the book, The Goblin Emperor follows a fairly predictable plotline. Each day Maia wakes up, is confronted with some new political problem, and must bumble his way through it. The book is court politics at its finest, and if you are into aristocrats having heated debates while groping for power, this book does an incredible job of distilling that feeling into its purest form. On top of this, the characters are mostly delightful – Maia, in particular, is both adorable and lovable. He is a kind and loving soul and a large part of the book surrounds his tendency to break with imperial tradition in favor of showing empathy and sympathy. This leads to a number of truly heartwarming moments as Maia ambles through the book like a giant regal teddy bear. The supporting characters are all well-developed, and I got a very good sense of the court and its history through the careful worldbuilding that Addison weaves into her story. Addison’s prose is also above average, and I found myself reaching for a dictionary to look up new words (that were used to excellent effect) on more than one occasion. However, while I really enjoyed all these positive aspects of the book, there were also a handful of negative ones that severely weighed the reading experience down.

For example, while the setup and execution of the political intrigue in the book were fantastic – the follow through often left a lot to be desired. By this, I mean that a lot of the machinations of the story often felt like they had very little bite. To give a better illustration of this, there are multiple attempts on Maia’s life throughout the course of the novel. These moments are thrilling when they are happening but in the aftermath, Maia still clings to his aforementioned kindness and empathy by suggesting that a timeout will hopefully be enough to prevent future regicide attempts. His staff, as usual, convince him that this is not a possibility but by this point, I was starting to worry that Maia was not showing a lot of character growth and that the book wasn’t taking me seriously. While I understand that a major theme in the book is Maia’s uncompromising empathy, Addison did not do a strong enough job showing how Maia works through complicated situations to find a empathetic solution, which painted Maia as childish and naive. On a similar vein, Maia did not feel like he had enough agency in the story in general. Almost half of the book is him reacting to the actions of other characters or telling his staff to accomplish the results he desires without putting in any of the work. While I like Maia a lot for his warm heart, he did not come across as a particularly strong character – even by the end of the book.

The book as a whole also felt a little rushed and shallow at times. A major theme of the story is bridge building, both literally and metaphorical. Maia’s goal from the start of the book is to make friends, build a family, and bridge a river to connect two dissonant factions of his empire. The novel does an incredible job laying the foundation of these goals – showing a very clear “before” picture of the uphill battle Maia must make. By the time the book is finished, we have just seen a number of these bridges tentatively built, which is great, but we get absolutely no time to enjoy seeing the friendships that Maia establishes. The book ends with the characters saying “sure, we can be friends,” which is all well and good but I wanted to revel in seeing these characters’ friendships in action.

In addition, while the world building as a whole was very good, it was also weirdly patchy in certain areas of the novel. One example of this was in the implied racial tension. I think it is safe to assume that if you tell an average fantasy reader that you are reading about a half-goblin in an elvish society, that the reader is going to expect some racial tension. While there is a tiny amount, it was not present in nearly the same amount I was expecting. Addison only partially explains the racial politics between the two groups, but I think I am inferring correctly that elves see goblins more as distant strange relatives as opposed to a race of inferior useless sub people (which is what I expected). The names of the characters in the book are also needlessly confusing. God help anyone who tries to read this book on an e-reader because I essentially had to flip to the name appendix at the back every other page. Even then, I still had a very hard time keeping a number of characters straight.

Finally, the descriptions in the book could sometimes feel like they were glossed over. I think the best example of this was when Maia receives an incredible “emperor clock” from the clockmakers guild for his birthday. Or at least I was told it was incredible, I don’t know myself as I have no idea what it looks like. After being told by four separate characters how incredible it was, Maia finally gets to see it and just says “They were right, it was both incredible and surprising”. That’s it. Moments like these really broke my immersion in the world, which is a shame because Addison’s creation seemed like something in which I could lose myself.

Overall, I don’t want you to think The Goblin Emperor is a bad book. Addison has an eye for political intrigue and does an incredible job distilling it down to a single engrossing book. There was the potential for this to be one of my all-time favorite novels, but it missed the mark due to the list of grievances I outlined above. Overall, The Quill to Live definitely recommends The Goblin Emperor, I just also suggest that you temper your expectations somewhat.

Rating: The Goblin Emperor – 7.0/10
-Andrew

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The Dreamers – A Wake Up Call

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81-ovsfccplAt least once a year, it feels like the news highlights an outbreak of some dangerous disease. Very often it’s contagious, with disastrous side effects and varying numbers of fatalities. I myself was quarantined to the University of Delaware campus during the outbreak of swine flu in 2009. The Center for Disease Control was brought in, and the school’s field house became a medical center. Luckily, I and the people I knew were unaffected beyond our inability to leave campus. But still, to look back and remember that bizarre episode as I write this feels surreal. Karen Thompson Walker manages to capture that same feeling in The Dreamers. Through a methodical narrative, Walker details the slow spread of the disease, the inability of the authorities to explain it, and their eventual quarantine of a small American town in the northwest.

The Dreamers starts with college kids coming back drunk from a night of partying. None are the wiser as one of the young women sleeps through the morning. As the day wears on, she does not answer texts. As they come to her room in order to rally her for another night of partying, they find they cannot wake her up. She is taken away by the hospital, and the other students console each other. Over the next several days the students learn that she died in her sleep. Slowly, other students in the dorm succumb to the same condition. The campus isolates the dormitory, effectively sealing the students in. As time passes, more students across the campus and later the town fall ill with the sleeping sickness. No one knows what to do, and the only treatment seems to be life support until they can wake – if they ever do.

The book follows several sets of people affected by the disease in different parts of Santa Lora, all at different stages in their life. Often Walker pairs her characters off, with one suffering from the disease and the other dealing with the repercussions. Unfortunately, despite this interesting take on storytelling I never felt particularly investing in any of the characters.. I got the two male protagonists confused, and I only felt attached to two individuals because they were among the first characters introduced. It’s not that our cast was uninteresting, but that I saw them as just the vehicle to the tell the story. It helped that Walker highlighted that the disease affected people of different social standings, showcasing their different reactions and their ability to survive the outbreak and subsequent quarantine. My favorite dynamic was between Mei and her dorm-mate Matthew. Their budding intimate relationship was shown in counterpoint to their very starkly contrasting outlooks. Mei and Matthew felt the most fleshed-out as characters, due to their muted and often touch and go young romance along with their relentlessly emotional discussions about what they can do as the world falls apart around them.

For me, the selling point of The Dreamers is the procedural style that Walker forces the reader to sit through as this small town slowly becomes threatening to the rest of the country. The disease starts small with the college students and eventually breaks out into a nursing home. Doctors and medical researchers are brought in, and no explanation or cure can be found. Many of the victims do not wake up, regardless of drugs administered. Oddly, they are all experiencing high brain functions, suggesting they are all dreaming. Still, this explains nothing to the professionals. As more people fall asleep, the national guard is called into blockade the single road out of the mountain town. Walker is blunt about the response, often citing other periods in American history in which the government was brutal in its methods to prevent further contamination. It shows that Walker did her research when writing this book, as everything felt very realistic.

The surreal and foreboding tone of The Dreamers easily kept me invested until the final pages, as Walker’s writing read almost like a clinical report of the events. Often, entire chapters were just a statement of facts: “The disease appeared in [INSERT BUILDING HERE] building, infecting [X NUMBER OF] victims.” The number of beds being filled and slow attrition of medical personnel succumbing to the disease felt like a losing battle. It helped build an apprehension that I had a hard time shaking. Even the chapters that followed a character had a detached feeling to them. I do not know if this was Walker’s intention, but I often felt like I was supposed to be unattached, so I could understand the whole picture instead of focusing on a single character’s struggle to leave the town. It was paralyzing in a way I did not expect. On top of that, almost every ramp-up in the response to the disease was paired with a story of a true historical episode, heightening the realism and the dread that a cure may never be found.

Unfortunately, beyond the plodding descent into controlled chaos, the disease itself did not feel like it added anything to the narrative. I was mostly intrigued by the dreaming aspect when I first heard of the book, hoping it would play an important part in the progression of events. Unfortunately, the dreaming did not seem to play an important role in the narrative and it was a bit disappointing. After a week of thinking about it, I still could not find a connection that resonated with me, but it was something I gradually became okay with. Others may find something in the dreams that adds to their experience of the story, but unfortunately, I was left wanting. The disease was not the star so much as it was the instigator and catalyst to the greater story.

In the end, Walker’s focus on the community, the town, the society, and the people that comprise those institutions makes this book worthwhile. It is a story that has been told before, but the tone and the research backing up the narrative’s speculative events solidify the realism. I did not get as invested in the characters as I wanted to, and some of the undertones of the dilemma of individual versus community could have been clearer. However, Walker’s distanced approach to writing, as well as the slow buildup of unreleased tension make The Dreamers an experience I recommend.

Rating: The Dreamers – 6.5/10
-Alex

A Bad Deal For The Whole Galaxy – But A Good One For Me

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Alex White was really working overtime in 2018. Fresh off the release of his debut book, A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe (Big Ship), White has just released a sequel with an equally lengthy name, A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy (Bad Deal), in the same year. Big Ship was one of my top books in 2018 and I described it as Firefly, meets Fast and Furious, meets National Treasure. The book was fun, exciting, and had excellent combat, but unfortunately also suffered from a cast that was fairly insufferable for the first half of the book. However, this is the price that one must play when you are committed to character growth, which White clearly is, and I was excited to dive into Bad Deal and continue the story we left off from book one. There are some mild spoilers for Big Ship following this paragraph so if you want to remain completely pure I would recommend coming back to this when you have finished book one.

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Jumping into the story, Bad Deal is set a few months after the climactic events of Big Ship and we pick back up with Boots and Nilah more or less where we left off. Boots is moping at her distillery but is quickly dragged back onto the Capricious. The crew has grown to include two mysterious twins and our cast of characters are hunting the financial bankers of the villains from book one in order to continue dismantling the shadow organization. The book follows this plot thread through five to six fantastic settings and ridiculous events until ending on a climax that rivals book one. In other words, the plot of this book is a good time. White has a really good eye for exciting scenes and I think these books would make fantastic movies. The magic also continues to be excellent, despite its complete lack of structure. In book one we were introduced to a fairly small range of spell users that had fairly straightforward abilities, such as making shields or integrating with machines/hacking better. In book two, White expands the magic we see noticeably and highlights a number of spell users with weirder abilities – like “hoteliers” whose magic is basically used to make rooms feel like nice hotel lobbies (I am paraphrasing, but not joking). However, despite these strange additions the magic system only felt more vibrant and fun in Bad Deal and found myself simply excited to see what White would show me next.

It was no surprise that the plot and world of Bad Deal were excellent, they were what carried the first novel to lofty heights. Where book one really struggled was its characters, as I only liked the cast for the back third of the book. I am super excited to say that the feeling of affection I felt at the end of Big Ship carried over perfectly and allowed me to hit the ground running in book two. Bad Deal runs like a well-oiled machine, using the character growth from book one to springboard into new emotional issues for the cast. However, the warmth I felt to the various members of the Capricious only strengthened in Bad Deal and I found myself more invested in their dramatic arguments and fragile emotional states. I was on the record as saying I thought Big Ship was “overly dramatic” and I think a lot of this feeling came from not caring about the characters enough as they poured their hearts out. Now that I adore the cast, I had many fewer issues with its soap opera style drama and found myself happily yelling at the characters as they worked through their issues.

If I had to find one issue with Big Ship it would probably be the story structure. The pacing of the book will certainly never leave you bored and moved at a delightfully fast speed. However, when reading the book you can definitely tell that White sat down and planned out three or four events that he wanted to build around and then carefully strung them together. It’s a very minor criticism, and it did very little to detract from my experience, but I wish that these scenes flowed a little better into one another so that the book felt a little less like discrete chunks.

Overall, A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy improved upon its predecessor on almost every possible metric. The action is more intense, the world is more exciting, and the characters are more lovable. Given the fact that I already loved book one, Bad Deal’s improvements are all the more impressive and I have no doubt this series is shaping up to be a strong recommendation for any reader. My final thoughts on the book are that there better be more than three books in this series because I am nowhere near done with the plot, world, and cast and want to spend as much time as I can among White’s wonderful creation.

Rating: A Bad Deal for the Whole Galaxy – 9.0/10
-Andrew

An Excess Male – More Than Necessary Reading

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51WJWWdGrzLIt’s a great time for readers and writers of dystopian fiction. Whatever world you want to imagine where something terrible is happening, it is out there for you. One can recede into the classics, finding new relevancies and warnings. Then there are the newer stories that draw inspiration from the past, with the emotional resonance of today’s anxieties. I mean, sure the world is terrible, but we can always imagine new ways it could be worse, right? I honestly did not realize that I was going to be reading about a dystopia. The very basic description had an air of a satire, sexually oppressing the men to highlight the avalanche of anti-woman dystopian stories in our culture. Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male instead provides a narratively balanced but horrific look into a banal and homogenous society that feels like the next logical step in the nationalistic population restrictions seen today in modern China.

In An Excess Male, the one-child policy is still in place and the Chinese government has expanded upon it by allowing women more than one husband due to the disproportionate number of men in their society. Each man can have one child with his wife, and the blended families act as a single unit. The story begins with Wei-Guo, a forty-year-old fitness instructor, as he attempts to become the third husband in an already troubled family. The initial husbands to twenty-two-year-old May-Ling are brothers, a sixty-year-old businessman and a software engineer in his fifties. The story is told through the perspective of all four characters as they weigh the pros and cons of letting Wei Guo enter their lives. The family grows closer and secrets are revealed as the oppressive weight of national duty grows heavier on everyone’s shoulders.

Plot and pace-wise, the book feels closely-woven with short focused chapters that exude empathy, while also subtly filling empty space with inescapable dread. The narrative takes place over a few weeks, setting up the story as a snapshot of these character’s lives where the stakes feel incredibly universal, but ultimately very personal. King chooses to place the story in a time where the rules have already been established, enabling her to focus on how lives unravel as individuals attempt to mold themselves to meet the stringent needs of a system. Personal feelings, habits, and ways of life that we take for granted are examined through a system that ultimately finds the open expression of diversity to be inherently hostile. King also manages to highlight how the ruling regime benefits a very small subset of people, using small personal connections between the characters and others in different strata of the society. King uses numerous lenses including lifestyles, sexual orientations, and even cultural views of developmental disorders to demonstrate that regardless of gender, nobody benefits from such a societal structure.

King is not only able to control the plot with an even hand but successfully molds it to highlight the story’s antagonist. As the narrative progresses, the characters’ personal dynamics change, shifting between excitement and anxiety as they process welcoming a new person to their family. While these emotions are normal, they are exacerbated by ever-present pressure from the story’s Chinese government and society. What you or I would consider to be normal interactions are given new weight and urgency under the regime that King has created. The trifecta of husbands are willing to submit to whatever demands are made of them in order to look normal and fit in, while May-Ling is cornered by her lack of choice and will, her feelings negated in the service of society. It is a brutal expectation, reinforced systematically and repeatedly through their interactions with each other and everyone else they encounter. King shines by coating almost every moment with this creeping oppression, never fully overwhelming the reader until she needs to.

King’s writing of her characters complements this tremendously. Instead of focusing on changing her writing between the point of view switches, King chooses to centralize her protagonists differing emotions. King highlights how little anxieties pile up on each of the separate characters, immediately making them relatable. The hardest part as the reader is knowing how all the characters feel as you watch the proverbial emotional pot boil over repeatedly. I found myself hoping that the characters would open up and talk about their feelings with one another, thus sharing just how awful their experience is. When they finally have conversations about their feelings, hopes, and fears, it was a hollow catharsis. It did not matter. The characters could not solve their problems by working together because they were not each other’s problems. Rather, the society they are forced to inhabit is the problem, as it stokes the flames of existing insecurities, fears, and anxieties. While May-Ling and her husbands understand this, they also know they cannot change the system but also cannot change themselves to meet the strict standards. They are left to take it out on each other.

When I first read this story, I was sucked into these people’s lives, wondering how they were going to escape, or if there was even a chance for escape. Things that felt quirky and weird in the beginning became darker and more sinister as the book went on. There was one moment where the illusion was broken and the emotional waltz was interrupted as a pure naked force was used by the Chinese government. It seemed unnecessary to incorporate blatant state-sponsored violence to advance the plot, considering how well-paced everything else felt. After a few days of thinking on it, however, I realized it had to be there. I got so caught up in the machinations of the system, so enamored with King’s future China, and so mixed up in the emotions of these fictional characters that I had forgotten about the real, tangible violence already being inflicted. The brutal display of physical power was there to remind the audience that people’s lives were actually being ruined. Sure, it is a story- a good one, with excellent characters- but it is also a warning. Even though you might find a way to scrape by and conform in the small ways that take the eyes off you, others cannot. In such a world, those that cannot comply must be removed in order to ensure that the whole is perceived as homogenous.

An Excess Male is the right kind of dystopia. It does not overwhelm initially by introducing an interesting premise and slowly ramping up the tension. By choosing to focus on such a small time period in May-Ling and Wei-Guo’s lives, King allows the reader to expand the tension across other aspects of daily life outside the book’s focus. These small interactions add up through the book, painting an elaborate picture of emotional friction that has no true resolution. While I have become more and more a proponent of trying to envision a future that is worth fighting for through stories, books like An Excess Male can also play a role in the uncertain times we live in. Just as I was distracted by the intricacies of this menacing dystopia, I realized that I and others must avoid lulling ourselves to sleep with “it can always be worse” stories of totalitarianism. Because it can always be worse, but people are also hurting right now.

Rating: An Excess Male – 8.5/10
-Alex

The Gutter Prayer – Get Your Mind In This Gutter

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51dGKfMrwvL._SX331_BO1204203200_This is pretty much the coolest post ever on the site, and I’ll tell you why. I’m writing from the future! Not only did we here at The Quill to Live receive an advanced reader’s copy of The Gutter Prayer (in exchange for an honest review), but I’m writing this from the back of a taxi in London. Not only is this being written before the book is even out, but I’m writing it from tomorrow (depending on where you live and what time it is, I suppose it could even be from the past all things considered but since that’s how these usually go that sounds less cool).

Let’s get the actual review started, shall we? To whet your appetite, I’d like to give you my one-line description: take RJB’s Divine Cities series, throw in a little churchy intrigue a la Gladstone’s Craft Sequence series, then top it off with a healthy smattering of unique and fun ideas and you get The Gutter Prayer by Gareth Hanrahan. Any longtime readers of the blog will know just how lofty the heights of our esteem is for The Divine Cities and the Craft Sequence, and they will surely be wondering whether this novel soars like an eagle or a little more like Icarus.

I’m gonna go ahead and spoil the rest of the review a little here and answer that lead-in question: the book was great. I had a really fun time with a varied cast of characters, a unique and vibrant city I enjoyed exploring, and a surprisingly deep and interesting world. While there was a bit of hand-waving when it came to filling in the parts of the world we didn’t see, there was enough fleshed out that I’m excited for a chance to go back and hear more about them. The city that we spend the duration of our tale in, Guerdon, is an old and storied merchant city with a long enough past that some of it is bound to be dark (and oh my does it turn out to be). With an incurable plague that slowly turns its victims to statues, alchemical monsters patrolling the streets, and ghouls living alongside humans Guerdon has a lot going on. It would be easy to just sketch the city out in broad strokes with so much else to describe, but Hanrahan does a great job of making Guerdon feel lived in and real. As the story unfolds and we become privy to more of the city’s past I became more impressed with the amount of thought that was put into it and how interesting it all was.

As cool as the city was, however, you need solid characters to do things in a story. Spar, Rat, and Carillon are the three main characters in The Gutter Prayer and they’re all thieves. Spar is a stone man, afflicted by the plague mentioned earlier and the descriptions of his illness and what he goes through to survive it just a little longer can be heartwrenching at times. Carillon is a vagrant and thief recently returned to the city after running away in her childhood. Rat is a ghoul. I want to point out that the fact that a main character was a ghoul was my main reason for choosing to read and review this book. I was hoping that would add a bit of something disturbing to the story and oh boy does it. I don’t think the sections from Rat’s POV would necessarily turn anyone off of the book by itself, but there are certainly things that made me squeamish.

That’s a perfect segue into explaining why I was reminded of The Divine Cities, one of my absolute favorite series, when I was reading this book. Hanrahan’s creativity in coming up with and describing the various non-human “monsters” in his story is spectacular. Roaming the streets of Guerdon instead of a police force is the “Tallowmen”, waxwork figures made from criminals (and possibly others) with a burning wick on the top of their head. Super strong, super fast, and with a wicked knife instead of handcuffs, the Tallowmen added a lot of great tension to the story considering our main characters are thieves. The Tallowmen aren’t even the only thing: Crawling Ones, the aforementioned population of Ghouls, Ravellers, various alchemical horror-weapons, and in the near distance is the Godswar where maddened gods twist nature to do battle with one another. It all adds up to nearly a thrill a page and it felt like nearly every chapter was a cliffhanger in terms of exciting new things to see.

It can’t all be good, of course, and while the characters and world were amazing, the plot felt little rushed and unfocused. It felt very much like a couple of stories mushed together to make a single longer introduction to the world, and while it didn’t put me off the book I think that a lot could have been done to make the pacing better. It’s a plot we’ve seen before, and in a book that is so bursting full of unique and fresh things, it sticks out a little bit.

All in all I think that The Gutter Prayer is an interesting and extremely fun entry into The Black Iron Legacy, the name of this new series. I love discovering new monsters and I’m a sucker for detailed, old, and dangerous cities. If you’re anything like me in those regards you’ll absolutely love The Gutter Prayer. I’m interested in where the sequel goes, because much like City Of Stairs, The Gutter Prayer ends with a variety of paths open to it. I’ll be keeping my eye out for the sequel, as I think this series is going to be one of the major talking points of 2019.

Rating: The Gutter Prayer – 8.0/10
-Will

The Lions Of Al-Rassan – The Meaning Of Loyalty

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51LJr0L05CL._SX330_BO1204203200_It will come as no surprise that I loved today’s book, The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. We at Quill consider Kay to be one of the best authors currently in the fantasy and science-fiction scene, and when we read one of his books it is less a question of “is it good”, and more a question of “how good is it?” To immediately answer that question, the answer is: really, really, good. The Lions of Al-Rassan is a masterpiece that everyone should read and just barely loses out to Sailing to Sarantium as my favorite Kay book of all time.

Lions is ostensibly a historical fiction based on the civil wars, and eventual unification, of Spain. I think. I am not a historian, so my knowledge of this time period and the metaphors that Kay uses are not the best. Regardless, the book tells the story of a country divided by kings (lions). Kings are everywhere, popping up one after another, and each claims to be the true heir and inheritor to the land around them. On top of this, there is a panoply of warring religions in the region that are all vying for dominance in the form of religious genocide. As you might guess, these conditions make for extremely turbulent, dangerous, and fluid times where power structures and the hierarchies of nations are changing constantly. In the midst of all of this, our story follows four “advisors” to various kings and gives a poetic dissertation on loyalty and the difficulties of being a good person, and doing the right thing, in nebulous times.

Our leads are Jehane, Ammar, Rodrigo, and Alivar – four brilliant and talented individuals that shine brighter than stars on a moonless night. If I were to pick a true “protagonist” it would have to be Jehane. She is a doctor, and one of the best in all the land. Through her work as a neutral healer, she finds herself welcome in almost every court and land and is constantly in demand from the multitude of kings in contention. Next, we have Ammar – warrior, poet, and tactician. Ammar is possibly the greatest mind of an age and second to the most powerful king (currently
) in Al-Rassan. However, he has had to do many terrible things for his lieges and is finding it harder to be true to himself. Then we have Rodrigo, Ammar’s counterpart in a rival faction. Rodrigo is a charismatic leader, beloved by his men, and possibly the single best fighter in the entire country. He and his band of 150 horsemen of Jad struggle with being true to their kingdom, and its zealous religious faith, while internally struggling with some of the doctrines and beliefs of their land. Finally, we have Alivar – one of Rodrigo’s aforementioned 150 horsemen – who is young, naive, and trying to make his way in the world. Through Alivar’s eyes we witness a young man who has a talent for war, but a mind that desires peace.

The characters in Lions are frankly phenomenal. I deeply love every single one and Kay shattered my heart at least five times over the course of the book. The story is just beautiful and feels like it speaks to good people trying to be good in situations where there are no good options. I found Lions asking me to think about smart questions I had never considered before, such as “what do we owe our children?”, and found it to be a very thought-provoking and contemplative book. It helped me grow a little as a person, which is, in my opinion, the single greatest trait a book can have. It also did this while showing me a positively fabulous time. On top of the characters being genuine joys to be around, the book is funny and fun when it is not being sad. The dialogue is witty, and the situations characters find themselves in can be hilarious and heartwarming. To top it all off, the book is a standalone and ends with an incredible climax that feels both thematically satisfying and gripping to read.

There is absolutely nothing imperfect about The Lions of Al-Rassan. The pages of this thoughtful story are poetry for the heart and this book would easily place in my top 100 of all time. The characters are eternally memorable, the prose is top-in-class, and the story is engrossing from beginning to end. The Lions of Al-Rassan is a masterpiece of fiction and a book that should be on every person’s must-read list.

Rating: The Lions of Al-Rassan – 10/10
-Andrew

The Ember Blade – A Modern Lotr In Many Ways

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51asw0iub3lIn a very strange twist of events this week I ended up talking to my father, who doesn’t read much fantasy, for several hours about Lord of the Rings. He was interested in some of the characters and wanted to talk through their motivations for a project he was doing. Over the course of the conversation, I was reminded just how powerful and well written Lord of the Rings is, as well as just how high a bar it set for all the books that followed. This is why The Ember Blade, by Chris Wooding (a favorite author of Quill for his Ketty Jay series), is such an accomplished book. If you heard me mention this book before, it was probably from our “best of” list earlier this month (found here), where The Ember Blade slide into 19th place as the final book I read this year before making the list.

As I mentioned in my brief description, The Ember Blade is not a particularly innovative book. The book follows a group of adventurers, who fall into the range of classic fantasy classes (ranger, thief, warrior, druid, bard, etc.) as they embark on a quest to find a legendary sword. The book is told from a number of POV’s, but primarily follows Aren – a fairly typical “farm boy with a destiny”. The plot feels like a reimagining of The Fellowship of the Ring, where a group of unlikely companions come together to do something with a relic of power to save the world. However, despite its clear similarities to the grandfather of all fantasy, The Ember Blade never feels like an out-and-out copy. Instead, the book feels like a new epic fantasy that anyone can sink their teeth into, while paying tribute to the series that started the genre. Chris Wooding describes the book as “a return to classic fantasy adventures and values, from a modern perspective” and I think this description really hits the nail on the head.

The worldbuilding in this story is excellent. The conflict revolves around understandable tensions between two nations: The Krodan Empire and Ossia. Ossia was conquered and colonized by a martially superior Krodan Empire and currently is occupied and governed by the aforementioned nation. The Ember Blade, the namesake of the book, is a sword that essentially works like Excalibur (conveying kingship onto whoever holds it), and our group of characters set out to steal it and start a revolution. The relations between the two nations are interesting and nuanced and both Krodan and Ossia feel like they have a well-developed identity and culture. In addition, the magic in the book is often subtle (much like LotR), but when it is present it is both imaginative and exciting. It really is a world you can get lost in, which is good because there is a metric butt-load of time devoted to worldbuilding. Have I mentioned this book is absolutely massive at close to 900 pages? We will come back to that in a moment, but first, let’s talk about the cast.

I honestly expected Wooding to trope out on his cast. With such a large set of characters, it would have been both easy and understandable to leave them shallow. However, Wooding takes no shortcuts and each member of the cast has a memorable and enjoyable personality. In particular, all of the cast are flawed and complicated individuals who all undergo growth over the course of the book, and not all for the better. The Ember Blade does an amazing job of showing the reader how hard times and experiences shape people. Some grow stronger and more tenacious, and some wear down and succumb to weakness. The cast does an amazing job of speaking to humanity as a whole and I promise you will be engrossed by every single one of them. Which again, is good, because they would need to be engrossing to carry your attention through the 900 pages.

The only problem I really had with The Ember Blade was its (surprise, surprise) colossal length. It is really hard for me to objectively judge if the book was too long. Longer books often present difficulties for reviews as they eat away at the time that could have been spent reading shorter books to make additional content. That being said, I do think that the first 20% of the book is a bit drawn out due to slow pacing. The actual story of the book doesn’t start until page 200 – but those 200 pages are still perfectly enjoyable chapters that establish the cast. It is really that I just found myself much more engrossed in the book for the back 600 pages compared to the first 200. However, I firmly believe that this book is worth your time despite its huge size and slow start.

To reaffirm what Wooding himself said, The Ember Blade is a return to classic fantasy adventures and values, from a modern perspective. The book does an incredible job of melding everything that made Lord of the Rings incredible with all of the lessons the genre has learned since to create a modern classic. Mark my words, The Ember Blade will rise to a must-read on most fantasy lists in the next ten years so if you want to be ahead of the curve go check it out as soon as possible.

Rating: The Ember Blade – 9.0/10
-Andrew