Oathbreaker

If your anything like me, you picked up this book because you love Dwarves. They're my favorite fantasy race, and it's difficult to find books that centers on them. This has, unfortunately, led me to read some books of questionable quality and this is one of them.

There are far too many main characters in the book to ever manage to really feel attached to any of them. Which is a good thing, as most of them will die. I'm not kidding here, the author seems to love to senselessly kill his characters off, oftentimes almost as an afterthought. There's so little back story to any of the characters, you start to get their names confused anyway, and are constantly having to look back to see who so-and-so was.

The story has a fairly short arc, going from bad to worse, and worse, and worse. It becomes almost painful to keep reading as dwarves die meaningless deaths, and more and more enemies are thrown at them for no real reason. As if thousands of Skaven weren't enough, Orcs and Goblins appear as well, and then a dragon shows up just because the dwarves weren't in enough trouble already.

On top of this, after finishing the book, I realized that the time line laid out doesn't really make any sense. Things that should have happened several years ago are spoken of as having occurred just months before... and small jumps in the times it would take for things like travel don't seem to add up.

The ending itself, while somewhat keeping with the dwarven lore set forth in the Warhammer universe, is just so bad you feel wronged by having read it. Ending the book in this way, with no hope for the few remaining characters, sank the battleship.

Honestly, the book seems rushed- if the story had been told over two or three longer books, it may have worked better. It needed the time to get back stories for the characters set out, properly describe locations, and have a story arc that flowed better. I can't say much for author's work; I found this book to be poorly written, but I haven't sampled anything else by him either. All in all, I wouldn't recommend this book, unless you were desperate. One would be better off reading Markus Heitz's “The Dwarves” series.