R.R Virdi

Oh my gosh, I can’t wait for the next book! Apparently it comes out in October this year so I’m excited it’s so soon! As you can tell, I enjoyed this very much. It was very reminiscent to me of The Book of the Ancestor Series by Mark Lawrence, Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang, and The Poppy Wars by R.F Kuang together. And that’s saying a lot because these are some of my most favorite books.

I love this type of magic system, called bindings in this universe, where you must tune in to the nature of the elements and use your willpower and faith in the outcome to produce a change in reality. This one also starts with an orphaned boy who doesn’t know of his family, yet is given a bound book that is said to hold his family secrets that he will only be able to open when “he is ready.” Ari works and lives in the under stage of a small theater, toiling to create all the sound effects for the plays he wishes to play the hero in. But soon, trouble brews, a binder comes to mentor Ari, and the boy is soon set on a winding and treacherous path which may be closer than he thinks or even wishes to starring him in the lead.

This is told as a frame story in which Ari is an adult storyteller, performing in inns with small bits of magic to enhance his tales. He meets a singer and begins to slowly tell her his story. Most of the book is this story of Ari’s beginnings, but we still get plenty of the present time as well and a plot taking place now. There’s also a few chapters from the singer.

I will admit this book was a very slow start for me, and I wondered how I would like it or if I would get into it enough, but then once it got going I was hooked. It has to set up the scene at first, so I would just suggest to give it time to get into Ari’s backstory once the frame story transitions. And the way it ended…I have so many theories, questions, apprehensions, and most of all- suspense, which seems like such a fitting place for Ari’s story to end after all. For now.… (mehr)

This was a trainwreck of a book. I am not sure if I was braindead when reading the first one or if that one was significantly better than this.

There are so many things wrong with the book I will only touch on a few because neither you nor I have the patience to go through all of it.

The author doesn't trust us even with the slightest of deductive reasoning. Everything is pointed out in excruciating detail. There isn't a single conclusion, be it about the plot mystery or be it just about the emotional state of a character, we are allowed to get to on our own. And everything is repeated ad nauseam. Not only the torturously repeating explanations but also every time anything relevant is mentioned the entire history of that information and its relation to the current situation is repeated again. "This sounds like a raven like the one I saw 5 years ago when I bought ice cream from the guy with the weird haircut that probably went to that bad stylist 3 streets over where a man fell out of a window once..." and so on and so forth.
And it's with everything, every detail entails a detour again and again through the same information over and over.
It's like with every new piece of information the author believes it necessary to summarize the entire plot of the entire series up to that point.
This is obviously slightly exaggerated but it's not far off.

All the characters were only able to express emotions in extreme ways. From a face of agony to pure happiness and laughter to soul-shattering despair to excruciating horror. Nothing in between. And they switch between them all like changing a hat. It's very disorienting and takes any and all emotional impact.

Then we have the absurd endless monologues. And it's not only once and not only the evil mastermind either. There are probably a dozen monologues, each one pages-long, about how the baddy was only saving people and how compassionate and loving he was and all that clichée bullcrap. But the main character isn't one bit better. He is only being pushed around by literally everyone including a little girl all the while acting like he is the tough guy and at the same time constantly monologuing how he basically murdered all the people that have actually been killed by evil monsters. It's just tiring. I can't scrape together even a little bit of compassion for him anymore.

One last thing I want to mention is the plain logical inconsistencies everywhere. A mental asylum in which 4 people died of heart failure within days and no police investigation? really?
And that's the smallest of them but that's the kind of inconsistencies spread out throughout the entire book. A whole bunch of them are necessary to make the ridiculous plot work at all.

There are so many other really bad tropes you usually only find in Japanese live-action movies or Indian action movies I don't have the patience to list them all.

Especially towards the end, everything goes far beyond over-the-top and ridiculous.

I am done with this series and probably done with the author for a long time.… (mehr)

Thank you to NetGalley and Tor Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Somewhere around 3.5 stars. This book was mostly easy to stay engaged and interested in, though there were a few spots where it dragged on a bit and I started to lose interest. It does switch between two timelines - the current time and his history and how he got where he is now that he is telling to someone in the current time. Usually the transition isn't too bad but sometimes it can frustrating to make the switch and it felt a bit like two books in one. One of the things I struggled with was that knowing that this was the first of an epic fantasy series, the story wouldn't be completed in this book. Although things develop through the current time and there is a direction both timelines are going in, there wasn't a specific goal or issue that would be resolved. Overall it was mostly enjoyable.… (mehr)