Review: This book draaaaaagggged.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 11 15, 2013
Doug, you are really getting bogged down in battles here.  This book is about a war, I know, and part of what makes the book good is applying structured military tactics to this unique setting.  However, you only have to explain the formation of a proper spartan phalanx so many times.  We got it by the first chapter: Interlocked shields in front with short swords, spears in row 2, and longer pikes in row 3.  Rotate to keep the troops fresh.  Yes.  You made me read pages and pages of that formation explained over and over again.  Stop it!  Just say "the troops quickly shifted into phalanx formation and greeted the charging, unorganized Ellala with a wall of steel and systematically shredded the charge, suffering negligible casualties.Easy!  Shorten the repetitive details and your battle scenes will feel less cumbersome to the reader, and you'll be able to spend more time moving the actual plot along, and that's a major point because in this book the plot went nowhere.Beginning of book:  Bad guy says go find these powerful weapons to his henchmen.  Goddess of good responds by telling her henchmen to go stop them.  Then a battle starts, and keeps going, and going, and going, and at the end of the book, the henchmen are still looking for this stuff.The battles don't advance the plot either.  Another 150,000 empire troops are massacred.  Yea, this has happened over and over again already.  They seem to have no end of ineffective 100,000 man armies.  The end result is the good guys get a little closer to the capital.  So that's basically all that happened in this book: the army got a little closer and some guys were sent on an errand.