Crash into Me

Non-human protagonists are always tricky. How do you make them relatable and still fundamentally alien? Too much of one without the other makes the intended effect fall flat.

Enter Task, a wind-carved stone golem who spends the centuries turning the tides of war for the highest bidder. He's been magically compelled to follow the orders of a parade of violent warlords, and the whole experience has left him rather jaded. And yet, Ben Galley manages to make Task a lovably terrifying creature and an absolute joy to read about.

The real strength of Heart of Stone is the characters. Aside from Task, there are two other main POV characters: Lesky, a young girl who shows no fear of Task; and Alabaster, the legendary knight who slew the last dragon. If there's one thing that shines above the rest of this story, it's the friendship between Task and Lesky. It's a beautifully heartwarming presence in an otherwise dark story.

There's a lot of plot packed into a relatively small page count. Hartlund has been plagued by civil war for nine years, with one side supporting the boy King and the other rebelling against tyrannical leadership. Both sides are depicted in shades of gray, with neither being definitively in the right. One side purchases Task at the beginning of the novel in an effort to bring things to a bloody end.

Hartlund was an interesting setting to explore. Most forms of animal life are magical parallels to real-world creatures. For example, imagine a stray cat, but replace the fur with scales and make their claws a lot scarier. The magic was intriguing, as well, with most of it relying on getting into people's heads to communicate or enslave.

To me, the war served as a backdrop for Task's character development, which was the true heart of the story. Task was caught between the violence of war under a commander he can't disobey and the love of an innocent child. These two things drive Task's arc and thus, the story. As such, I occasionally lost interest in the battles when the stakes escalated beyond the personal level. It felt a bit rushed, with a plot-driven climax tacked onto the end of a character-driven novel. That said, this was minor criticism in a compelling story that I loved from start to finish.

Overall, this was an excellent read. The few issues I had with the story were far outweighed by my inability to put the book down. For those of you who enjoy audiobooks, Adam Stubbs is a relatively-unknown narrator who is absolutely phenomenal. Just wait until you hear his golem voice for Task.