Free the Darkness

Love the story, wish Frisha didn't exist.

I don't enjoy crapping all over an author's work, particularly since I might not ever be able to do any better myself. Furthermore, it is an incredibly difficult thing to put yourself out there by showing what you write to the world, so having people hate it is probably very disheartening. Clearly I'm in the minority since this currently has a 4.24 rating somehow, but even still, negative reviews probably sting no matter what.

Ok, to get right to it: this is essentially what you would get if you told the Twilight author to write a fantasy book from Edward's perspective. Rezkin (this story's Edward) is literally perfect in every way except for his sheltered upbringing. Men want to be him and women want to be with him. ALL of them. Every single situation he finds himself in, he utterly dominates. And he does it with style and panache. He fights off overwhelming odds or performs feats of astounding strength and we are expressly told that he isn't even breathing hard. He manipulates situations expertly despite never actually dealing with anyone but his trainers for his entire life. He has memorized the floorplans of obscure buildings hundreds of miles away, because he was trained to do so for some reason. I could go on and on.

And yet, we are to believe that in all those years of training, the concept of “friends” was never once raised, let alone explained in passing. Someone says, “We're friends, right?” and he literally assumes that there is some list of his friends somewhere that he's not aware of, but these people apparently know who is on it, so he will be their friend.

Oh, and the use of italics for multiple words all throughout the book was about to drive me insane. To me, italics is either used to indicate some foreign word or concept (maybe magical terms, for instance), or in casual conversation it is used to put a stress on a particular word. As in, “That guy is weird.” So every time I encountered an italicized word (often many, many times per page) that wasn't some obscure word, I kept wanting to stress it in my mind, but it wasn't meant to be so it kept annoying me. Perhaps that nitpick is all me, but I'm not the one that italicized hundreds, maybe thousands, of words over the course of the book.

To go along with the fact that the main character is literally perfect, and all of the other characters are boring and worthless other than to show how awesome he is or to fawn over him, there is zero tension in anything that happens. We know before he even starts that he's going to succeed at every single thing. Kill 15 master warriors all at once? Super easy, barely an inconvenience. Infiltrate and take over every thieves guild in the city? Super easy, barely an inconvenience. Like, not even an hour to do it kind of easy. Not breathing hard either, I'm sure.

Without any thought whatsoever that he might fail at something, all we are doing is following along and seeing events being told to us. Aside from slowly (way more slowly than someone supposedly this intelligent should be, but it is 100% so the author can keep up the ridiculousness) picking up on some of the social cues he lacks, he is never going to get better at anything, because he has mastered everything. I mean, unless he ascends to godhood or something. Which, given how it started, might not be out of the realm of possibility.

I know what a Mary Sue and a Harry Stu are, but what do you call it when the (female) author creates a character that embodies everything the author wants in an ideal male? Lacking a better term, I'm going to call it an Edward.

I have convinced myself to read the next book. If this continues I won't be finishing the series. I have no idea why people love this so much, unless it somehow came to the attention of all the people that loved Twilight. That's the only way I can justify it in my head.

The book started great, a dark military fantasy about an autistic (human) Terminator released upon an unsuspecting world, with violent and hilarious results. I absolutely loved that, but then the author (or the editor) decided to keep introducing YA unoriginal characters, to turn everything into a much blander epic fantasy and to concentrate on the flirting. She (the author) lost me completely half way through. Also, her unique choice to constantly use multiple POVs in the same scene/page was disconcerting and felt amateurish (I never met anything like this). I was really excited at the beginning of the book and increasingly disappointed as it moved on (into YA, esentially). I hope miss Kade will eventually move into fantasy for adults, cause I would certainly be a fan.

That was a slog. Too simplistic for me and rather YA in some sense. I guess this is the reason fantasy that does well has characters that are flawed but overcome that flaw. Without that you have a fairy tale.