Grave Empire

For me this was fine. It had some good moments, but it felt more of an atmospheric work as opposed to a more story or character based novel. This is not a bad thing if that is what you look for or want in a novel, but it just did not work well for me.

I also did not get along with any of the characters. I am not a "character focused" reader, but two of the main characters were kind of milk-toast, and the third turned on a dime from an interesting flawed character with dubious motives to mustache twirling villain in a short time span.

The storyline with the mer-men I felt too long to get going. It felt like "and then" travel blogging for over half the novel to get to the crux of the story line. The most interesting story line was in the far east, but I felt we were given the least amount of pages dedicated to that story line and then removed the POV character from the region at the end of the novel.

Will I continue? I dunno at the moment. The novel started out at 4 stars and then for the majority of the middle it was solidly in the 2.5-3 star range with the ending showing some more promise, but continuing some of the issues I had in the middle. I'll have to let this marinate for a while to see if I would be interested in continuing the series.

This book absolutely slapped. The world is greatly expanded from the first trilogy and the fantasy + horror combo is present throughout the book. Plus mermen that have armor clad shark companions I mean come on that’s awesome!