Hi, I'm Paul Spooner and this is an in-depth review of the fantasy book Chronicles Everfall, Shadow of the Conquer by Shad M. Brooks. I'm not gonna read the entire article because it's 19,000 words and that would take like over two hours. That's way too long. So instead I'm just gonna do a brief summary of the things I thought and highlight it. So as you know, Shad is a YouTube personality. He does a lot of stuff on the internet and on YouTube especially and he does a lot of critique. A lot of thoughtful analysis and he is interested in things making sense and being internally consistent and so I thought that I would apply those principles since he professes to value them himself to his book. So I bought copy of his book and in doing this review I went over some of the things that he said in other places about writing and listen to a few of his book review or writing review segments where he reviews other people's work and I found that he says that he is not a poet himself and I thought that that was pretty apt. In reading his book it's not poetic. It's not eloquent. The writing is not great. It's passable in most places. There are a few places where it's it's actually quite bad but his dialogue is strong and as he says himself his characters are interesting and good. Shad just recently released a video saying that he's gonna be on convalescence for about a month and I figured that now would be an ideal time for him to take a couple hours to read this review and perhaps get a few pointers from it. So I'm making this video and I sent him an email through his website saying that I'd like him to read this and I wrote this in forum and you know if it'd be helpful. He didn't hurt her back obviously he's busy and you know he has a lot to do but I figured maybe now it'd be a good time for him to do this so this is just kind of a teaser of the things that I thought. So he says that he values the work of Brandon Sanderson and Sanderson has some lectures on strategies for writers and one of the lectures is at lecture number two in his 2013 lecture series on YouTube and it's Show Don't Tell and and there is a lot of Show Don't Tell problems with the Chronicles of Everfall. Shad of the Conquer so I'm not gonna like I said I'm not gonna go into the details here it's just that's the first section is like hey there's a bunch of just you know good writing kind of stuff that you fall short of which okay it's his first novel but the other thing is that is he he very frequently says that this isn't his first novel but this is the ninth novel he's written or something like that where he's been practicing and practicing and improving his craft until now he feels like it's good enough and it's like well I don't know I don't feel like it's good enough yet I mean I'm not sorry that I read the book so maybe it is good enough but especially when he's aware of the principle of Show Don't Tell it's hard to overlook it so that's that then there's the issue of the main character himself Dailynn he seems like I'm already stew he's just so overpowered he has lots of different abilities and they're all better than everyone else I've got a big long list of all the things where he's just better than everyone and well it's possible I mean like there are some people who are just better than everyone else and everything but it's not foreshadowed in a convincing way and he doesn't behave in a way that would I don't know I wasn't convinced that it was a genuinely superior character it felt more like it was a convenient plot device for the author to solve problems by just saying well you know Dailynn can do this and Dailynn can do that well yeah you got to you got to convince me and I wasn't convinced so that's another whole section talking about Dailynn and how he seems like I'm already stew he seems overpowered and then there's a whole section about Dailynn has supposed to be this terrible person and he's supposed to be his horrible war criminal and so I go over in depth all of the different ways in which he thinks that he has failed and then my analysis of whether or not those are actually moral failings in my view and most of them are not there are a few that are genuine moral failings I think but because he seems to berate himself so frequently for things that aren't actually problematic it comes off as angsty it's not really I didn't like that aspect either so then we get to the setting setting of Everfall and the my summary for my view on the setting is that it's overreaching it's it was attempting too much there's I think where did I count seven or eight really significant differences between the canonical universe in which we find ourselves real life and this other setting this fantasy setting and usually one or two is plenty in order to have an exploration of you know what is life like and and to kind of not overwhelm yourself having to think through all the implications of the things that you're changing so Chad I feel like was just trying too much and he is a lot of differences they're all interesting and I thought that they they could have been well well put together but it didn't actually convince me that he had thought through how the world would actually work because I found a number of problems with the way that he presented the world and how it seems like there wasn't enough thought put into what the implications of all the changes all the all the departures from reality that he's made and so like I said at the beginning this isn't I'm not trying to be mean I'm I'm trying to apply the principles that Chad himself says he values and internal consistency and and the world making sense is one of those things and so I felt like it would be appreciated to give him a clear view of the ways in which I felt that he had fallen short of that ideal so as I said at the beginning it's not terrible but it would have been good to have a better technical execution a more believable main character and less ambitious world building I was gonna say that I'm looking forward to the next book but I don't know if I am there's so many problems with the chronicles of everfall setting that unless there's some serious reckoning going on or maybe some really brilliant descriptions of exactly how these things work it's gonna be hard for me to really enjoy the setting moving forward but we shall see in the meantime I hope you've enjoyed my review and I'll leave a link to the whole article in the description so that you too while the way the hours reading my review of Chad embrookes chronicles of everfall shadow of the conqueror thank you and good night