Review: Well done, if a bit shallow for my tastes.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 14, 2013
Especially in the beginning, the fantasy elements weren't incorporated with as much of a unique element as I'd have liked to see. For instance, human mages rely on potions, and it's left at that. Nothing to lend depth, such as the potions tasting horrible, making the mages sick later, having addictive properties, being ridiculously expensive to the point where mages couldn't practice magic outside of royal order, or having to be brewed differently depending on the type of magic being used. It just made bits of the setting feel a little thin. It's a minor pet peeve, but those little tics in the worldbuilding are what grabs me in someone else's written world. Fantasy is all about its tropes, but the more distinctive you can make your treatment of them, the better it feels to a reader like me.The characters were on the whole pretty well realized, but there were spots where their motivations were not cohesive with their characterization prior. It moved the story forward, but it didn't feel like the characters actually felt the way they acted. So, if you read it in the moment, and don't look for complex motivations, it's an enjoyable read. But it's not the most immersive fantasy I've stumbled onto.I have some pet peeves with the flow of the narrative- the prologue never really ties into the story, and there's some parts that feel choppy. There were a few minor errors- broken quotations, a homonym or two, and a minor continuity error in one town being referred to and treated as a "village" in the beginning, and one of the kingdom's two largest cities, in the end. On the whole, it's well edited, easy to read, and will certainly appease that fantasy craving.