Spellmonger

Nice opening and pace but side characters fall very flat by the end. Enjoyed the arrogant protagonist initially but felt he needed stronger people to bounce off for it to work. I won't continue with the series.

I love the concept of the story. However, the implementation seemed a bit off. I enjoyed the read, and will continue the series, but it seemed long-winded at times. As a quick non-spoiler example, at one point the author spent a good portion of writing covering the names, details, and short backstory of a group of mage's he was involved with. I would be okay with this normally, however, I don't recall any of those mage's having more than a mention through the remainder of the book. It just seemed like unnecessary character development. This type of divergence from the overall story, or activities happening at the time, happened a few times.

Given the above, gave it a 3, but would easily be a 3.5 if I could give it that :)

The narrator of the audiobook was good, but didn't fit the young, brash protagonist, he also had an unfortunately strong love of the Shatner pause.
The story was overall interesting, but the first chapter was the best and the rest was almost entirely tell instead of show with a lot of summaries of things that happened. There was a whole heck of a lot of info dumps of world building, very little of it relevant. I like world building as much as the next person, but it has to be interesting for me to be, well, interested.

One hour of fight scenes. I couldn't stand this in The Iliad, I will most certainly not endure this here.

Read 1:01 / 18:22 6%