Review: A series that had the potential to be something, but turns out to be less than nothing.
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 02 19, 2013
I love fantasy books, I have read several hundred of them, and I usually enjoy even poorly written ones.  This is a series that has gotten under my skin though.  I bought the first two books, and then someone lent me the third because I could not bring myself to pay for what I considered the second half to book two(and it very much was).I'll write pro's and con's before I go into my reasoning as to why this series should die(or be re-written by someone who cares).Pro's:Interesting charactersSeemingly well thought out world with an intriguing setting.Con'sTerrible development(time wise and character wise)Has Viewpoints from just about every character in the storyNo thought into distance and size of country/world as related to travel and messages.Editing... there is none.Characters take random actions or make instant decisions just to push the story forward, not something they would do according to their character previously (kind of) established.This series starts out well, and gives you a great setting for things to happen in.  Things start to go horribly awry after the first couple days however.  Events begin to unfold at a pace that is ridiculous in it's stupidity.  This kid goes from Sheppard to fighting on the edge of the kingdom with a monster within a week(no training needed to be sent on a death march).  Right here is the place where you get the feeling that things are not well thought out, and it just gets worse.  The wise mage gives the king warnings that he should train the boy and let him become great, but the pace in which the author decides to make the first two books happen quickly makes this a moot point and useless conversation.  The king marries his oldest daughter to the neighboring kingdom's prince, they hold a wedding, and then leave.  The next day the king is killed, we meet back up with the daughter as she's with the king of the other land.  They have already gone back to their kingdom, and then left to go to the ocean in that day or two, and a messenger is chasing them down with the information that the king is dead(which is semi believable until the third book where the neighboring kingdom has been attacking villages for three months without anyone noticing, and they finally get to a village that is three days ride from the capital!).  That's only the tip of the iceberg that is wrong with the size and distance this story happens within.Every character has a point of view.  This wouldn't be bad if the story were well thought out, and long enough to make any of it matter, but as it is it's just filler for an already convoluted story line.  Thor finds a cat creature(from the descriptions when it is found it makes you believe it's a mountain lion-esque creature)and gets a hawk within a day of each other.  The cat grows so fast during the first couple days, but still fits in the characters shirt.  A hundred days pass and the cat is still small enough to hop into peoples arms or ride around in a shirt, and yet it can fight off monsters.The kingdom of the ring is large(we are lead to believe).  Yet for some reason the ocean can be seen to the south, and Thor marches with his fellow recruits to the north end in less than a day(yet takes almost a full day to ride with his Knight friend to the first crossroad and back).The main character still has no idea how to use his power(even though he's used it a dozen times a just the right moments).  It also occasionally doesn't work at just the right moments.For my last thing I care to write about(Yes there is a lot more that could be said), the dragon.  This dragon is so big that it's footprints look like canyons, and for some reason the dragon has a tiny treasure room at the bottom of one of his footprints.  This dragon attacks them, and they decide to wrap rope around it's legs to try to trip it....A.  How much rope do they have to fit around a leg that is longer than 50 menB.  How in the name of all that's good in holy do they even begin to think that they could trip it?C.  The dragon actually notices that his leg has been wrapped by the thousand feet of rope the legion members had on hand, and instead of ignoring it, it breaks the rope(because it didn't want to wear a bracelet).So, the fight progresses(inside of the dragons footprint, which the dragon all the sudden fits into).  Thor finds the power within himself to jump up onto the dragons head(the dragon that has teeth as large as houses, so... we're going to say flew up), and then mentally suggests to the dragon to go somewhere else(and he does, even though Thor has no idea how to use his powers, and has never mentally linked with anything as far as I recall).So, if you have read all of this and still want to chance it, good luck... I can get past a couple things wrong with the story, but when they start piling up higher than a dragon that's bigger than most mountains I start to lose interest.P.S.  Solo Plexus is not a thing... I wrote the first one off as a spelling error(which was a stretch, because solar wouldn't have been auto corrected), but the second time it was used I knew you didn't know what it was.  If you want to use terms like Solar Plexus to sound smart, i'd probably make sure i'm spelling it right.