Review: Color me frustrated
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 25, 2013
Lannon Sunshield is a reclusive boy, living at the edge of nowhere, with unhappy parents, no prospects, and no ambitions. But when the three greatest Knights in the land stop by to visit, everything changes, and Lannon's rare gift for a forgotten form of magic earns him a place in the knightly training halls. Just in time to save the kingdom from certain doom.I like youth-in-training stories, and I wanted to like this one. The thing I like about them is the slow build. I like getting to see the hero putting in his time, paying his dues, and stumbling through a surprise adventure or two along the way. The adolescent boy in me can relate to that. Lannon, however, had too much of the adventure and not enough of the dues-paying for my tastes.More importantly, the dramatic tension in this story only works because the trainees are too stupid to tell their superiors what's going on, so they end up running around, little more than untrained farm boys. They battle big bad monsters that would normally make a full Knight tremble. And then they win. They are in no way confronted by the consequences of their selfishness. I find it very hard to like characters who get rewarded for being selfish and stupid. I just want to kick them all down a flight of stairs - not follow them into their next misadventure.The writing here is decent, there are some interesting monsters, and there appears to be a well constructed back-story driving the political arc, but the characters did not ring true for me on too many fronts, and I didn't see any new twists that made Lannon's situation stand out from the many other tales just like it. So in the end, there was nothing to hold my attention away from the bits that clunked, and I noticed them more than I should have.