Review: Obtrusive plot devices ruined it for me.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 08 5, 2011
I couldn't finish. There are strong points - the core story is familiar (average Joe's life is destroyed, works to obtain revenge), and the details of that story are handled reasonably well.  Valdieron and his life are introduced deliberately to permit us to feel some sympathy before the forces of evil wreak havoc in his life.  Mr. Day conveys a familiar cozy set of place and then burns it to the ground so that we feel Valdieron's anger.  Unfortunately after that the plot advances through external exposition.  Some sort of ghost or ancient spirit has been waiting for centuries to pass along plot exposition which isn't very interesting or well written.  But the second or third appearance the ghost is assigning quests.  At which point the story falls apart.  I lose interest in books where the characters' actions are driven by external forces.  Conflict and drama arise through character motivation and action.I'm also somewhat allergic to the super-human scale of "save the world" - Day's conceit that demons are invading from another dimension was introduced well enough to permit me to ignore the scale of the plot at first.  As long as the characters were learning about the external threat through actions that were intrinsic to the story, I was willing to coast along and ignore the end of the world. But if the story is so weak that it needs the services of a century old ghost to move things along, then I've lost interest.  Those ghosts are, both metaphorically and literally, less than two dimensional characters.  Every moment that the protagonist spends interacting with them is stolen from potential character development that would result from the protagonist's interaction with a real, motivated, three dimensional character.I'm surprised because Mr. Day shows a commendable restraint on other matters. There are relatively few superlatives - the main character is scaled like a normal human, not like the astonishingly gifted heroes that inhabit much fantasy fiction. Unlike many other low budget fantasy novels I've read recently, women are depicted well and fairly.  In scenes where gender doesn't matter, gender is given no more attention than hair color or dress; just another attribute to enable the reader to remember who is who. In the very few scenes where gender does matter, it is not possible to predict the character's action based on their gender.  In point of fact the female romantic lead had the promise to be one of the more interesting characters in the book with real, conflicted motivation.I'd suggest that Mr. Day have a chat with a horse person before writing about stallions again; I'm given to understand that leaving a stallion in the middle of a herd of unfamiliar horses isn't the wisest idea.Ultimately I've got a limited amount of time in my life to read, and I'd rather spend it on something with fewer, less obtrusive plot devices.