The thousand names

Gunpowder fantasy was a genre I didn't know existed until I read Brian McClellan's fantastic Powder Mage series. I evidently like my fantasy with a side of nice uniforms. Who knew. Unfortunately for me, this didn't quite fill the hole in my fantasy heart, and overall lacked a bit of cohesion I really kind of needed to bring it together in my mind.

There's two main points of view in this book: Marcus as the colonial captain of the army trying to make things work under a colonel sent by their king from their homeland, and Winter, a girl-masking-as-a-guy enlisted in the army who gets a field promotion to lieutenant. She doesn't feel capable of handling this new position she's in as she's now in command of a sizeable amount of troops she's responsible for keeping alive. Despite being in relatively close proximity throughout the book, the two points of view never really overlap until near the very end of the book. As a result, it felt sort of like I was reading two separate stories entirely within the same book.

I did like the unique setting and plot, but they're a bunch of colonials putting down a rebellion in the country they invaded, essentially, and the book's framed this as a good thing and they're the good guys. It felt a little....weird, in that respect.

It's also got kind of a slow start. Things didn't start picking up and moving towards some goal until the last half or third of the book. Stuff happens in the beginning to flesh out the main characters, but it feels a bit disjointed after you get to the actual meat of the story and things that happened and mattered before don't seem to fit anymore. One example of this is when Winter wanted to use the training ground early on to train her super green and inexperienced troops. She, being relatively low on the rank structure doesn't have much sway, but she manages to trick her way past another higher ranking guy and earn her some extra field time. It felt at the time like this was something important, or at least that it'd come back to bite her, but it never did. There's other examples of small events that felt larger, but were never referenced again.

I've added the second book to my to-read list for now, but I'm not sure I'm going to rush to pick it up, or that it'll hang with some of the others that have been waiting there longer.