Review: Vlora Gets Her Day in the Sun
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 25, 2013
Brian McClellan's debut novel, Promise of Blood, shows epic promise.  One of the most well targeted complaints against it, however, is that the female characters are poorly drawn and tangential to the main story.  This includes Vlora, who exists in Promise of Blood primarily to set up Taniel's story and create conflict between him and his father, Tamas.The Girl of Hrusch Avenue is a short story set in the same world and featuring the same characters as Promise of Blood.  We learn about Vlora, seeing her as an orphan child: who she is, some of why she is that way, and how she came to meet Taniel and Tamas.  There was so much conflict among the three in Promise of Blood.  Here we see why they initially took to each other.It's the sort of thing a fan of Promise of Blood will love, a weak salve for the ache for The Crimson Campaign, book 2 in the Powder Mage trilogy.  But it's very limited as a short story in and of itself, neither a Thinker nor a Twister in my own taxonomy, just supplemental to the larger story.