It was said that the Free City drew all sorts, but mostly it drew all sorts of bad. Bright-eyed adventurers from all over Grandual came to Conthas with dreams of joining a band and touring the Wyld, and inevitably those dreams were distorted, like something reflected in a mirror made of shoddy glass. That, or they had the mirror broken over their heads.

I don't often dip into sword-and-sorcery fantasy like this often, which is kind of strange given the fact that I've either been in or have been actively running a D&D campaign pretty much continuously since 2015. You'd think that I'd be eating this kind of stuff up all the time, but reading this reminded me of why I tend to stay away from the genre with respect to my reading habits: it was an awesome, breakneck story that I feel like would've been more enjoyable in any medium other than a novel.

I was looking to shale things up and get my hands on a good hefty tome of a fantasy book that could be a standalone entry and wouldn't get me bogged down in a huge spanning series; this seemed to be a good fit. And it was a fun premise: a past-their-prime band of adventurers who were A-list celebrities twenty years ago need to get back together for one last job. But not all of them have kept themselves in tip-top shape all these years and hijinks ensue. I'm on board so far.

I think there were two main things that tripped me up with this story, the first being the pacing and the second being the protagonist. "Nonstop action" is a common blurb you see in advertising, but it actually applies here; there's damn near no downtime between chapters and one scene packed with dramatic action flows right into the next. But then that one flows into the next and so on and soon I feel like I'm out of breath. There were occasional moments of respite that finally gave the characters a chance to, you know, talk to each other, but they felt a little too spaced out for my tastes.

We're also following the perspective of one Clay Cooper, better known as "Slowhand" because he had a reputation of being the first one punched in the face in many a barroom brawl. I liked the idea of Clay, the sort of strong silent type who would occasionally drop a devastating one-liner, but that dynamic felt kind of cheapened when there's a second strong silent type with one-liners of his own already in the group, and there's only five of them. There were also long passages where Clay wasn't speaking or doing much of anything and it felt like the story was happening around him and not because of him. Just a more passive take on a protagonist than I'm used to, but that didn't mean I disliked him, I just wish I got more out of him.

That said, this book is effortlessly funny and got multiple genuine out-loud laughs from me, which I was not expecting. It leans on a lot of high fantasy tropes, but treats them more like a scaffolding than a crutch, and I was expecting them anyway so I'm not mad about it. Lots of memorable characters, interesting dynamics between the core group of old friends that fell out of touch with each other, a compelling antagonist, worldbuilding that didn't come off as daunting or distracting, and clever and witty prose are the things that are going to stick with me long after finishing this story.

Curiously I get the impression that I would've enjoyed this story more if it were serialized and I read like one chapter a week and stretched it out over a few months, or if it were a comic series or a podcast. Then again for me personally, my eyes start glazing over with any book past the 300 page mark, so maybe I was never really the target audience for this book.