Review: Well written story-wise, but should have invested in an editor
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 20, 2014
The story takes us in a bit of a new direction, with some fun new worldbuilding.The author either starts showing some real creativity, or fails to quite realize the implications of what he's writing, by having the protagonist start planning around his own Mary Sue plot-warping powers and his ability to easily dominate all the magical races, and then having the kid slapped down HARD for his presumption.  Which is kind of fun to read.The twist that magic (and the magical races) are going extinct essentially because even moderately clever use of non-magical technology is straight-up better than magic in every way, and the associated abrupt perspective shift where the reader realizes the actual reasons that humans are dominant in the setting (and that most of what the protagonist has been told about humanity's relationships with the other races are somewhere between propaganda and outright lies) is actually a pretty good storytelling trick.  The protagonist himself hasn't quite realized that he's an unreliable narrator and that the faction he thinks are generic fantasy-expy Nazis are justified yet, but hopefully it's coming.  There's a lot of potential here for things to end in an interesting way instead of the generic boring-last-battle-where-good-wins bit.That said, how much of this is actually intentional is sort of an exercise for the reader (since Our Hero hasn't realized the "humans used to be the whipping boy of the magical races" implications of the Elves' history maybe the author hasn't either) and the series is in dire need of a bloody editor, for spelling and grammar at minimum.