Showing posts with label urban fantasy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban fantasy. Show all posts

Seven Sorcerers Review

Seven Sorcerers
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The blurb drew me into this book at once, by describing a young girl who woke up one morning only to find that her brother no longer existed. 'Ooh', I thought. 'People being mysteriously erased from existence is always interesting.' And it was! The title of this book is a bit misleading, because the seven sorcerers only really play a side role to the main plot, but I was still happy with the way it turned out.
The story isn't so easy to describe without giving things away. I suppose it's just a classic fantasy adventure of the "child enters magical world" type. Importantly, the characters are all likeable, the villains have proper motives (as opposed to being evil for no reason), and enough intriguing adventures and incidents occur along the way to keep the action flowing quickly. I would have liked to have seen more character development going on, mind you. When the characters are likeable, why not? There was one major character in particular who we never found out much about at all - the focus was entirely on his role as a guide and his escapades in various situations later on. I wanted to know more about his past, who he was, and so on. Even the main character wasn't fleshed out much. We met her mother and brother briefly in the opening chapter, but she seemed to forget about her regular life very quickly after setting out on her quest. This was a shame, because I felt I couldn't really get to know her properly. Ditto for the other characters. There needed to be more depth to them.
The one really major downfall with this book was the ending. I was reading happily along, when the text suddenly... stopped. I turned over the last few pages, thinking that perhaps I'd made a mistake, but no! It was really the end of the book. But I had so many questions that were left unanswered! What happened to the villain?! What about all these weird things that had been going on during the story that hinted of secrets yet to be revealed!? (I'd been looking forward to these revelations for the whole novel, and felt very cheated when they never arrived!) What about the mysterious person they all kept mentioning?! What about wrapping up the adventure?! The characters didn't even have a farewell conversation! I'd been expecting quite a few revelations which never happened! Very disappointing, and there ought to have been at least another two chapters after the place the book stopped. I suppose this means there will probably be a sequel released, because it makes no sense to just end the story like that, otherwise a whole bunch of things that happened would have been rather pointless. But even so, it could have been handled far better.
I'm giving this book a 4/5 (I'd prefer 3.5 if Amazon would let me, though). I liked it a lot, but the ending was terrible! (Well, that's not quite true - it's more like it didn't have an ending at all.)

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The Throne of Fire (The Kane Chronicles, Book Two) Review

The Throne of Fire (The Kane Chronicles, Book Two)
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First off, let me say that this is no Percy Jackson, in case you're going into this with vaulted expectations. However, these books do have their place, but the pacing is slower, the back stories a bit more longwinded (particularly in the first book in this series), yet the characters in both Percy and Pyramid are equally well drawn. Go figure. If you haven't read the first book, don't worry, the author does a decent job of catching you up on important details and plot points that lead to this book.
This time around, the book opens with a bit of action, as the kids, along with their new "special recruits" sneak into a museum and try to steal an artifact. This is typical, as a first book in any series tends to start off slow or include a lot of exposition and foreshadowing. Since we more or less know the characters in this book, the action plays out on a grander scale without sacrificing character development. There is another world-at-stake scenario in this book, via the chaos snake Apophis, who is a major threat to the Kane family, and he is planning to conquer the world once he is freed from his prison. But of course there is a plan to stop him. While not exactly a rehash of the events that involved the defeat of Set from the first book, you can tell that these books are in the same series, and take place in the same Red Pyramid world.
We get a lot of action and adventure in this book and loads of Egyptian myth that is presented in a fun way. But for my money, the book lacked a certain something. For one thing, it is drawn out in spots, and I'm a believer in tighter more streamlined storytelling. Another book series I started reading recently, which involves ancient temples and a thrilling artifact hunt, actually tells a rather compelling, tightly woven story. It also involves characters with unique abilities. Check it out here: The Crisis Artifact (The Crisis Trilogy) So while The Red Pyramid series can stand a bit of tightening up and trimming in spots, there are currently less well known epic series on the market that are begging to be read!


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