Review: Excellent Writing and Storyline; needs proofreader
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 12, 2012
The second in the Spellmonger series, "Warmage" starts where the previous novel, "Spellmonger", left off; the goblins are coming, with an expeditionary force of about a hundred thousand, while the Five Duchies are unready to acknowledge, let alone meet, the threat.  Minalan faces dangers to himself and his comrades from the Censorate (a kind of magical inquisition), roadblocks due to petty power-plays of minor nobles, scheming courtiers and spies, and the rather grander schemes of the ruling Dukes.  If he can overcome his human opponents, he'll still have to face the goblin horde.  But, if he can succeed, he may be able to usher in a new future for mages, removing the previous restrictions on owning property and conducting research; he himself may become the first Magelord in generations."Warmage" shows significant improvements in writing style and originality from "Spellmonger".  Part of that is that "Spellmonger" took a traditional "goblins invade" storyline with archetypal characters, then slowly warped them into original forms; "Warmage" begins within this more original framework.  Another part is that Mancour has grown as an author.  The book is epic in length, and describes an entire military campaign in detail; if you think George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series, but without the character jumping, you wouldn't be far off.  The level of internal realism is impressive, as was Mancour's ability to keep all the characters straight; I occasionally felt a similarity to Greek epics, where many side characters conduct much smiting.  The characters continued to grow, with the most significant growth centered around Minalan's coming to grips with his increasing responsibilities and power.  One of the things I most liked about this novel was that though magic played a large role, there wasn't a "magic bullet" solution to the goblins.So, that's the good part, and now we come to the bad; Mancour desperately needs a proofreader.  He can obviously write, understands semi-colons, punctuation in general, sentence structure, etc.  That said, there were way too many homonyms (words that sound the same but are spelled differently, eg greaves- a piece of armor, vs. grieves- sad feeling), occasional accidental keystrokes (eg, adding "m," instead of just ","), the occasional sentence skip (normally where a bit of text was accidentally deleted), etc.  The book is long, and it's inevitable that there will be mistakes.  Also, to reiterate, Mancour can write; the book is well edited, and it reads well despite the errors.  Still, it's at the point that the errors are distracting.  I'll keep an eye on the novel, and when there's been a significant proofread, edit my review and bump the book up to 5 stars.  Until then, I'd advise readers to think of this as an ARC (Advance reader copy, or pre-release book) that hasn't been to the proofreader yet.Overall, a highly enjoyable, impressive book that will keep even the fastest reader occupied for a while.  Recommended to fantasy fans in general; I wouldn't be surprised if enjoyment from this book resulted in friends being recommended to start the series.