Blanca Velasco Navarro Velasco Navarro itibaren Chandaparru, Andhra Pradesh, Hindistan itibaren Chandaparru, Andhra Pradesh, Hindistan

It took me a little while to get into this book, I have to admit. Normally this would be the type of book I'd really love & would get into, but for some reason it was just very slow to start off with. The Good: The premise of the series is pretty intriguing, a post-apocalyptic world where kids go to school in abandoned buildings & demons roam the world, tormenting anyone they come across. Also cool is the idea of a set group of people who are going to fight against these guys. I liked how fast some relationships are formed & I also loved the badness of Master Harper. As far as jerky adult almost-villans go, he's pretty entertaining to read about. His character is over the top but still fun to read about. (Just curious as to why someone like him would be left in charge, but I'll let that pass in the hopes it's explained in future books.) The Bad: Some parts of the book just felt underdeveloped. We're told this is a post-apocalyptic world but that's about the long & short of what we're told. There's no details as to *how* it got this way or why things are the way they are. I understand that this is just book 1 of a series, but things are way too vague in this first book. I also occasionally got irritated with Riley. I like that she's got guts,but at times she kind of came across as your typical Gritty Heroine. She's not really a Gritty Sue, so don't worry on that aspect, but Riley is pretty much your typical run of the mill heroine. We also get tons & tons of scenes with Riley complaining about this or that, which sort of grated on my nerves after a while, especially since Oliver is so stingy with other story details. Riley might have good reason to complain but did we really need so much of it? This is a pretty decent book as far as teen UF goes, but I just wish that more was explained & that less time was spent on teen angsting & more was spent on building up the general world in the book. (Review copy provided by Amazon Vine)

It is pretty clear reading this book that this is Guy Gavriel Kay's first book. He wrote one of my favorite fantasy series the two book 'The Sarantine Mosaic'. I re-read that a few years ago and it really holds up for me. I like him enough as a fantasy author (even if one of his other books disappointed me) that I figured I'd read all his books. I figured I'd start at the beginning so I could probably get the worst out of the way. I'm hoping this is the worst of the lot. The writing is very awkward. He enjoys writing sentences like 'He would know soon enough. Soon enough'. Over and over he writes sentences where he tries to share the majesty or deep meaning of what he just wrote by repeating a phrase. I found this incredibly annoying. It distanced me from the book and put the author in the middle between me in the story in a glaring way. It also made the narrator omniscient even though there wasn't really a narrator. I can't describe it better. Also the premise is a little 'eh'. Fionavar is the prime world among all worlds so 5 people are taken from our world to that world where they all become avatars of sorts within this world (powerful seer; rider & horn carrier among the plains; etc). Before those characters become something special I could not, for the life of me, tell them apart or remember anything interesting about any of them. Not all of the characters get anything interesting in this story either. One of the females basically stands around being pretty and having to say no to men propositioning her for sex. The women in this novel are not written well and the sexual innuendos are a male fantasy. The premise of the prime world means that all kinds of myths and other fantasy stories can be told in this one: this feels like a lord of the rings rip-off at times (it is an homage; Kay did work with Tolkein's son on 'The Silmarillion') and of course Odin and his tree are in it, and eventually King Arthur, etc. I don't know why this bugs me in this book when I loved American Gods which clearly uses the Norse myths. Probably mostly because the writing is clunky. On the whole I enjoyed it. It is not great. I'd recommend other books by Kay first. ... and then you get to the last chapter. (view spoiler)