Review: The tale of epic incompetence ends
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 10 29, 2011
I have read and reviewed the two other books in this series.Up until now, I've kept reading the book because the overall plot is OK. A writer friend of mine's tells me, you can get away with terrible writing, bland characters, and even plot holes as long as you have *tension*. There's enough tension in this series to string me along.But it ends now.At the end of the book, the main character Flare, gets training in the art of badass. He was trained in the first art of the three for *decades* ...... and  he is *still* the same angry teenage brat. You would think decades of training will confer *some* sort of maturity and calmness. (You've seen them before, that rare youth that look way older and wiser than his years; it happens in real life but not in fantasy?) Flare *still* "grinds his teeth" at someone who was helping him. (He also just had decades of training involving relaxation, so why didn't that happen?) Flare then inexplicably decides to leave on a long journey instead of sticking around and completing mastery of the two other arts.He leaves the place and promptly gets himself captured. He was trained by one showing secrets that have not walked in the world for *two thousand years* and still gets captured. The writing is bad enough that you have to infer why he got captured. The excuse was that, having just recovered from the training, he was in no shape to fight toe-to-toe with someone. Leaving aside that decades of training for complete mastery will include being able to do things even under extreme stress ... why did he leave the the place that he *knew* was protected? Why didn't he wait until he has recovered? Why did he not complete his training in the other two arts before leaving? You would think that his teachers would also teach the Art of War as well. (And if he did complete training in all three arts, then the author failed to convey that).The book ends there. I was mistaken in thinking this is a trilogy. Looks like the series is going on ... but I am not. I'm done with this series.