The Isle of Battle

4 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
The would-be peaceful Westbrook Fair has ended in disaster, with Arden Renne killed by his own kin's attempt to murder peace-oriented Toren Renne. The family's arch-rivals the Wills are rent by their own tensions, with mysterious sorceror Hafydd seemingly fully in control and intent on war. Meanwhile, three young men from the far north have been drawn into the violence through their casual acquaintance with Alaan - another sorceror and Hafydd's brother. And Elise Wills is missing, perhaps the victim of yet another sorceror, Hafydd and Alaan's sister.

Review
I quite like this series, and am always surprised it doesn't get more attention. It's not one that you can just pick up in the middle; while there is a ‘what has gone before' section, it's not really very well done. I didn't find it very helpful, and (or because?) I'd just read the preceding book. The summary is long, dry, and completely fails to capture the flavor of the series. In any case, definitely read all books and read them in order. There are a lot of characters (with even more identities) and a lot of moving parts, and you'll want to know them as this book plunges right back into the action.

There is a lot of action in this book. Possibly too much. For example, we get a very long escape sequence for a newly introduced characters. It's well written and consistently interesting, and I enjoyed it, but it is the kind of thing that could easily have been cut almost entirely without the story losing much.

Unlike (as I recall) Russell's Darwinian books, here the characters are just as (intentionally) confused about where they are and what's happening as the reader, and they say so, which is a nice little meta moment. And Russell provides enough answers to maintain interest and enthusiasm. This is a pretty long book, but I read it quickly. While it requires the first book, it's also better than the first book. We and the characters are no well settled in, and eager to see what happens next. A very strong sequel.

What's disappointing in this e-book version is that the conversion was extremely careless. There are typos all over the place – in a book that's been out in e-form for over a decade and from an author I see as being generally meticulous. They don't all seem to be OCR errors, either. Some are wrong word choices (principle/principal), and one glitch means that every closing single quote (') is not followed by a space. Easy enough to fix in edit, but also easy to spot and something the publisher definitely should have picked up on. There are many other similar problems. It's frustrating that such a good book is held back by such lazy proofreading.