Don't see the need for a new thread so posted here. New member by the way.
I've just finished the first book and although I enjoyed a lot of it, there was some stuff I thought was utterly absurd and took the shine off this book for me. I just have a few questions before I consider buying the next.
First, right from the off, soul shifting. Nothing wrong with the idea, but shifting into an inanimate object like a puppet or a bag of rotten body parts? Seems completely irrational to me and essentially makes every sorcerer an immortal. It wouldn't be so bad but it's done with no substance to support it, no theory, nothing. Could have been far better thought out, but I give the writer his licence, it's his world.
The 'bosses' as I'll call them. So much build up to the jaghut tyrant, and how underwhelming it all was. I was expecting it to be a real apex but all it did is walk to the city, and within mere moments of entering, it got grabbed by a random tree that just appeared from nowhere and dragged away. What a pointless exercise it all was.
Speaking of that random tree, what about the seemingly pointless scenes where Paran suddenly vanished into some other realm, does bugger all, and gets spat out back to the real world? The one where he protects the tree was especially ludicrous I thought. The Imass or Tiste Andii (forgot which) made a point of protecting this random house as its too young to do its job. And then all within a matter of a few seconds and a rapid fight scene, the tree/house is all of a sudden old enough to do whatever it must. I'm not one for things to be drawn out but that whole scene was so rushed it just lacked any credibility.
Then from the demise of the tyrant, a fearsome demon Lord which hasn't even been mentioned up until this point is released, yet far from doing anything remotely devastating, it gets battered and is dead as quickly as it appeared.
There are a few more minor gripes as well, mainly with characters (tattersall and sorry post posession I thougght were particularly bland and felt rushed, lacking any sort of human character) but I won't go in to those.
For me the writer seemed to have a cluster of ideas and tried to ram them all in to the detriment of the book as a whole, and as a consequence I felt the book built up to what I was expecting would be (and should have been) an absolutely breathtaking climax, which sadly never came and the whole thing just fizzled out without a bang.
Are these things a recurring theme throughout the series? Do random things just come and go with little to no background or explanation? Do the big bits continue to underwhelm and fizzle out? Do these random scenes shooting between realms for seemingly no reason continue to appear?
Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed a lot of this book. I loved the ambition, the tale told from each side of the conflict, no righteous or evil factions but just people doing what they do, the amount of characters and the way their paths twisted away and merged together, their interests conflicting and sharing with others both in and outside their own factions, I like the way it doesn't give away what's going to happen cheaply, and I love the fact that after reading the first book I still don't really know for certain where the series is going, like almost every other series will by now have let on. A coup is obvious but there are hints at other destinations.
Overall I'd say a promising book with a massive potential which it failed to realise and was ultimately a disappointment. I read that the series gets better and better as it gets on and I truly hope it does as the promise in the first book is immense, but I like a sense of credibility and rationality which seems to go amiss at times with parts I felt were rushed and thrown together without being thought through properly. I don't want to spend time and money finding out the hard way that this is the way these books are.
This post has been edited by Archibald: 17 March 2015 - 08:37 PM