The Nameless Throne

Not the review I wanted to write!

I absolutely adore Lisa Cassidy's A Tale of Stars and Shadow: absolutely the most underrated, enjoyable, and unexpected series I've ever read. So I was very excited to see what she did with her latest adult epic fantasy series. Unfortunately, it didn't come across as Cassidy's best work.

The differences here are pretty significant: we are more in the world of traditional high epic fantasy, following a fifteen-year-old orphan, Arya Nameless, who fights in a military unit called the Raiders. Eventually, she's adopted into the family of the Warlord Thiara Ravenstrike, where she finds a family with several other kids her age and trains to take up a powerful magical inheritance. A similar story to ATOSAS, but I found the younger characters a little bit less natural here than the mid-twenties characters in her previous series. The found family didn't feel organic to me, and many of the character-building scenes felt rushed and unjustified. It was hard for me to feel attached to the characters in the same way I felt with the Wolves. I don't like to compare, because this is very much its own series, but when you've written something as good as ATOSAS, it's hard not to.

Lisa Cassidy's worldbuilding is always interesting, and this is a much darker world than the one of ATOSAS, with constant threats, gray morality, and lots of fighting. The “five chosen ones” trope is an interesting one to mess with in such a dark world, and my prevailing thought was that this book was a slow setup for a potentially huge epic fantasy story. But it failed to hook me and I wonder if starting the story in medias res at the end of book 1 would have almost been a better idea.

Cassidy showed in ATOSAS that her strengths, unique for an epic fantasy author, are when the cast is very small. She can really be convincing about character dynamics and create great emotional plots, as well as being a master of blurring genres and writing kind of outside-the-box, wacky, over-the-top ideas. I'm not sure she's as strong in epic settings like this, and the parts of ATOSAS where the story abandoned the five or six characters we really cared about. I'm hoping the more isolated setting of book 2 will help the character arcs come a little more cleanly into play so that Cassidy can really exercise her strengths. I'm looking forward to it.

Rating: 5.5/10
Closest comparison: weirdly, Malice by John Gwynne (but better!)

ARC received for review