Malice

My reading rut continues and Malice is the next book to fall in to the abyss. I was excited to read the entire The Faithful and the Fallen series but I won't be advancing beyond this point.

I am not sure why I am failing so hard on fantasy books. It could be that I'm just burnt out on the genre, have shorter patience (or attention), or maybe I want a payoff without having to read 1500 pages. The unfortunate thing is that I have no significant fault for Malice.

The story was unfolding in a slow and deliberate pace. There were multiple viewpoints across the world, however I found that those outside of Corban's viewpoint everyone else was a nameless blur that I couldn't keep straight.

I won't leave a rating on the book because my rut shouldn't impact the rating of the story. Sorry Malice, I wanted to like you more.

So despite all the great reviews - I think there is a single person in my friendlist who read it and rated it lower than 4 stars - I didn't enjoy this as much as I had hoped. I read this expecting/hoping for something fast-paced and easy here in between heavier reads. That didn't work out somehow.

So what kind of book is this? It is the start of an epic fantasy second-world series. The story takes place in the Banished Lands - a scattered bunch of loosely allied human kingdoms nestled along some coast (was there a map?), beset by giants, and pirates. Magic is currently rare in this world. The reader sees the world through the eyes of several boys/young men who hail from different kingdoms. There is peace among the humans and all is well - besides a bunch of smaller and bigger intrigues going on, people being people. But then the "high king" calls for a council ... and reveals a prophecy about a coming war and a hero to deliver the humans from a deadly fate.. Although it is not apparently classified as such, this first book in the series does read like a young-adult novel which may be due to the age of all the protagonists who appear to be around 18 on average.

So why didn't I enjoy it? Mostly that has to do with pacing I would say. Especially the first half of the book meandered, back-tracked and made me generally impatient to get on with the plot. The "we're in the shire and our problems are those of summer children" part seemed to go on forever.

Next I had a hard time empathizing with the characters (I've become used to a more even spread of male/female viewpoints). They all begin with some very obvious weakness (arrogance, cowardice, paranoia) which they soon and easily overcome. It took a long time for me to start liking at least one of the characters. But at least Corban does seem to become more and more interesting. Although a lot of the credit for that goes to Storm ;) And also, I am not a big fan of the "chosen one" trope, I may have spend too much time with a whiny chosen one's complaining about voices in their head and some such ...

The way foreshadowing was used in the Veradis/Nathair storyline ... for the longest time I kept thinking - despite there having been a few hints towards the opposite - that Nathair really could be the good guy here. Why? Because the reveal never came even after I had long figured out what was going on. A good reveal comes a few pages after the reader figured it out for themselves. But this book left me waiting until about the 3/4 mark ... and I began to doubt myself and stared hard at the shadows between the lines hoping some third option would present itself the others being 1) (Nathair being the good guy which would have been beyond lame ... or 2) the author believing the reader still ignorant and not realizing he had dropped enough hints which in turn wouldn't speak well to his grasp of the story. So I spent a very long time mostly afraid the book would be lame. I kept hoping for a surprise an unforeseen twist that would reveal something completely different was going on.

A little more misdirection here and there and a few more subversions of common tropes, and a little humor every once in a while ... would have gone a long way to convince me of reading the next book, because the writing isn't bad, to me it was just boring.