Review: Entertaining Read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 21, 2013
As I’m sure a lot of you know, I’m quite picky when it comes to my fantasy books. I was a little worried when I began reading Tower of Obsidian, as a book can sound great with its summary, but then turn out to fall a little flat for me when I begin reading. Happily, that wasn’t the case for me with this book, in fact, the opposite is kind of true, the summary doesn’t sound as good as the book is!The story opens with a fantastic prologue that had me hooked on reading the rest of the book as soon as I possibly could. I loved the plot of Tower of Obsidian, for me, it was definitely one of its strong points. The story centres around a witch in her huge black tower, who has cursed the land the tower sits upon. There are guards, who are all more than meet the eye, on each level of the tower who must be defeated before the witch, Aurore can be approached. If that had just been it, I would have said it was still a fantastic plot, but there’s still more to it than that, lots of little details that just make the story all the more interesting.The characters were certainly a mixed bag, there were some I loved, like Naguset, Aaron and Rasheen, and others I really struggled to connect with, like Kale and Aoife. There were several points in the story that I wanted to slap Aoife for acting like such a spoiled brat, constantly trying to blackmail Aaron into doing things that she wanted him to do. I managed to look past it most of the time, but there were points where she got right on my nerves unfortunately! Tower of Obsidian had a whole host of characters, not all of them had a huge part in the story, but they all had a name, which was kind of confusing when I was trying to keep everyone in line as well as keep the plot straight in my head!What did surprise me was that there wasn’t a huge amount of world-building in Tower of Obsidian. Most of the story takes place in Ireland and on the sea, leaving the plot to contain the majority of the fantasy elements that I’m used to reading. That wasn’t a bad thing for me, whilst world-building is a staple of most fantasy novels, it was nice to read a book that didn’t focus on that as much.Tower of Obsidian isn’t a perfect fantasy novel, but it was a fun read, and certainly took me on an adventure that I wasn’t expecting to go on. I really enjoyed reading it, and can’t wait to see what Getty writes next.I received a copy of this book in exchange for a review.