Review: Very impressive
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 19, 2014
Although I am an avid reader and huge fan of the fantasy genre, having read countless books and 'flavors' of the genre from a wide variety of authors, it's not often that I can say a book has left me impressed in the way that "A Tide of Shadows" and the author, Tom Bielawksi, has.The first thing that really stood out to me is the pure originality of the characters and the plot - in the day and age where fantasy writers seem more plentiful than readers out there, it seems to be increasingly harder to stand out as the line between 'unique' and 'generic' becomes more and more dim. With that being said, I can definitely say that A Tide of Shadows does a great job of standing out from the mainstream, clone-like masses that seem to have been flooding the market lately, and it's ultimately not hard for me to tell that this book has been crafted not only with literary expertise(and clear competency of fantasy elements) but also pure passion, which is clearly evident throughout the well-thought-out plot and overall well-refined tone of the writing style,I will point out that the book did start out quite slow for me but I am definitely glad that I stuck with it - because, in retrospect, I feel that this slow-but-smooth build up sets up a great foundation for how the book plays out later on, mainly based on it's length and due to the many changes that the protagonist (and many of the other characters) go through. I was tempted to skip a few parts in the beginning, but they definitely made a lot more sense in regard to why the author included it as I progressed through the book - so, I just want to recommend that others stick with it, should they feel the same way that I did.Overall, I am giving this book a 4 star rating - I am very happy with the story, but I do think that a few of the 'background' characters could have been elaborated on a little more - and I do (regardless of my aforementioned statement) think that the book would benefit if the first quarter of it kept up at the fast pace that the rest of seems to abide by. Other than that, there's really no other aspects that I disliked about the book - the author has truly hit on something special here, and I am really looking forward to seeing future releases.