Review: King of the Bastards

King of the Bastards by Brian Keene
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a 2-star review which is a fair evaluation of my experience with this book.

Our protagonist (??!?) is a Conan knock-off who has all of the bravado and toughness but none of the nuance. He conquers and kills because that is what he does. Others are expected to submit to his will. That apparently includes raping women just because.

This book is an amalgamation of cosmic horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

Our protagonist is out adventuring when his group is attacked by various monsters from the ocean's depths as well as raiders arriving across the sea. He and one of his crew survive after running aground on some foreign land. They beat off the remainder of their attackers and are discovered by some of the locals.

The locals are afraid of some wizard that lives on the top of a mountain. In exchange for agreeing to help rid the locals of the wizard, the locals agree to travel with our protagonist as he sails for his home that has been taken over by raiders working for the deity that fomented in the original attacks.

There are two primary issues with this book.

1. Our protagonist is a cheap Conan knock-off.
2. The author is attempting a pastiche of the original RE Howard stories, but he is unable to consistently use language that is in keeping with that pastiche. He uses terms and phrases that are not appropriate for a Conan-type character.

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Review: Reign & Ruin

Reign & Ruin by J.D. Evans
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is a 2-star review. My experience would be closer to 2.5 stars.

This book won the SPFBO this year. I have read every winner since becoming aware of the competition. Those books have been uniformly fantastic...until now. The grammar and spelling were fine. The pacing was fine.

But I spent the first 15-20% of the book wondering if I was going to toss it across the floor in disgust.

The book is centered on a princess/sultana who is slated to marry whomever the powerbrokers want her to marry. Her father's memory and grasp on reality have fractured to the point where he really doesn't know what is going on. She is working to protect him and to protect her country from an aggressive nation to the north. Naturally, she disapproves of this marital arrangement and is working to get out of it. (as a reader, I sympathized with the Sultana) The Sultan's dementia is a result of employing his specific type of magic.

There are six magic houses. Each has a different skill (i.e. air, fire, water, etc.) and each has a different color. I had no real idea of how that worked after reading 15% of the book. There were some indications on some of the houses, but no real establishment of how magic works.

Why? Because in the first 15% of the book none of these supposedly powerful mages does a lick of meaningful magic. We are told they are powerful (mostly by the Sultana who is the focus of the book) but there is no evidence of that power in their actions.

The author does not understand the principle of "show don't tell".

That is the primary flaw with this book. We are told there are powerful mages. We rarely see that power in evidence. We are told that there are some nefarious characters but rarely see them behaving in a nefarious manner. We are told there is a threat from the neighboring country to the north and they never show up in the book.

The Sultana ends up falling in love with a prince from the country to the west. The two nations used to be one nation hundreds of years ago but were split apart. The prince arrives on a diplomatic mission that is part of the Sultana's machinations to avoid a forced marriage.

The two fall in love. Why? She is pretty and he is handsome. They don't actually do much of anything to justify each other's love. We are told they are pretty and that's that.

Then there are the obligatory sex scenes that do nothing to advance the larger narratives of the various storylines.

The last few chapters were predictable. Very little of the consequences in the story are actually earned.

While I usually am enthusiastic about continuing a series that begins with a SPFBO winning book, I have no interest in continuing this series. If not for winning SPFBO, this book would have received the Dorothy Parker treatment after reading 15% of the book.

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