"I have A LOT to say :D

But the headline is that I found it a very enjoyable book that I was keen to read.

I picked this one up primarily because I saw it was doing so well, saleswise, and had an incredibly high average rating on this site, stratospheric compared to the vast majority of fantasy books with 10,000+ ratings (a book's average rating with number of ratings).

I'm always keen to see what magic sauce successful authors use.

Additionally, James Islington was a semi-finalist in my SPFBO contest with The Shadow of What Was Lost, so I recognised the name and was extra curious.

For marketing purposes books are often described as mixtures of other famous books - my own One Word Kill was described as Stranger Things meets Ready Player One. Whilst reading this book it was easy for me to play the same game and say to myself that this element came from X and this one from Y.

I'm about to tell you what those Xs and Ys are, but first, let's be absolutely clear that this mapping is absolutely not a claim that the contributions were copied from these sources - it's just a fun game to play. Anthony Ryan's book The Waking Fire contained insanely close ideas to ones I had written in a book 15 years earlier - but that book was never published and it was simply not possible that he had copied them/been inspired by that book of mine. I note this to show how often similar ideas bubble up wholly independently.

Imagine the book is a fine wine and me the wine sleuth, sipping it, gazing into space, and waxing lyrical about notes of oak, Tuscan sun on eastern slopes, a high zinc content in the soil...

Immediately I saw shades of both Blood Song and Empire of Silence - we have what's effectively a war school (Blood Song) and the son of a royal house now down and out in an empire he wants to learn about &/or destroy (Empire of Silence - which in turn has shades of The Name of the Wind).

As the magic system revealed itself I saw strong correlations with David Farland's The Runelords where individuals sacrifice some of their own power (strength, health etc) to their own detriment, and contribute it to another who sits at the top of a pyramid of contributed power, leading to individuals with superhuman strength, speed etc.

We then learn about a physical game / assault course at the school, with moving parts, which is said to help attune your mind to the magic system -- which of course has parallels with the blade-path in Red Sister.

All of these story building blocks have bags of potential, and Islington constructs an addictively entertaining tale out of them.

We have a single first-person PRESENT TENSE point of view, which loads of people winge about when other people do it, but everyone seems to buy into without complaint here. Which just goes to show that you can do whatever you like in writing, as long as you do it well...

Our man is - and I say this with zero disrespect intended, a Gary Stu. He's not just good at everything, he's insanely good at everything. Over the course of the book he is lined up against experts in various fields/disciplines, and it doesn't really matter if he studied it briefly ten years ago or has never used the equipment before ... he's going to win. Again, in the hands of a less talented writer this would draw endless complaint. But it's such damn good fun - we/I eat/ate it up.

There are plenty of books where the main character is super good at everything, The Name of the Wind springs to mind, the Gor books (Tarnsman of Gor), even Prince of Thorns to a significant degree. I feel our man here, young Vis, also falls into the 'archetype' mould where beyond being disadvantaged and being moral/good, he's a bit of a blank onto which it's easy to project ourselves. So we can more easily share in his victories as he doesn't have a bunch of opinions and flaws etc that get in the way of steering him around as a proxy. And this of course is a guilty pleasure that works well in many books. Characters who are more complex and individual can, in many ways, be harder to identify with than the more generic hero.

I mentioned Gor above (a series with MANY problems) purely because it's a good example of a series that has another element that comes into play here, and that's "fantasy chess". A good number of fantasy books over the years have featured "fantasy chess", which is simply a made up game that is not given to us in too much detail other than it's a proxy for war and played on a board (or with cards). In Gor, our hero, Tarl Cabot (who is GREAT at everything) is also great at Fantasy Chess, and beats people at that in important moments to mix it up a bit.

Vis also has his fantasy chess moment.

And a slightly painful animal companion moment where he stops in the middle of something important in an interlude that feels entirely crafted to give us the "important later" animal friend.

And EVEN THEN with every writer bone groaning at the obvious levers being pulled ... I was loving it :D

Another grouch is that because our man's so good at everything we need everyone to be horrible to him and set against him succeeding. And that's not unusual in these school stories - we need a bully etc, and we get them in The Name of The Wind, in Red Sister etc, so I'm not being holier than thou here... my grouch is simply that the explanations for these people's opposition to our man are so thin, especially given the extraordinary lengths these grudges are taken to.

One teacher "doesn't like his name" - i.e. the family name he's adopted into. The teacher knows our guy was plucked off the streets for a purpose and isn't responsible for any of this, and yet on the strength of this old grudge does outrageous stuff that puts his reputation and career on the line.

Another boy has a grudge that our man didn't save his sister in a scenario where our man had no reasonable expectation of saving anyone, wasn't near the girl in question, didn't know her, and (without being asked and at great personal risk) saved many others.

Again - I'll return to my refrain: if I wasn't enjoying the book so much I might have laid my dissatisfaction at the feet of these issues. But I was enjoying it a lot and I've no reservations about giving it 5*.

At the end things get frantic, emotional, and finally rather complicated. It's a great read. I can see why it's doing so well, and recommend you give it a go. You'll probably love it too!







.."