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A review by thymrman
Mark of Fire by Richard Phillips
2.0
I found this book to be rather generic and uninteresting after a sort while. Nothing in this book felt like a really original idea, and it wasn't all that well put together with his method of writing. It felt like he had a list of places, ideas, and people he wanted in the book. Than tried to fill in the space between them to put things together.
The ideas never felt like they escaped the realm of generic fantasy tropes I've read many times before. We have a prophecy that involves a dark lord with a massive army and this has happened before in the past. We have the romance trope of not being good enough for the other. The cast runs into a haunted evil castle that has some back story, never does get explained, in order to escape a threat. The dark lords city stays hidden via magical macguffin for thousands of years without issue, until the heros stumble upon it.
At times the characters will escape an event through complete deus ex machina. It feels like he created this location and wanted to use it. But once he wrote the characters into it, he didn't know how to extract the characters. So he just kinda made something work, regardless of it being something that really works logically.
The characters didn't impress me really, Carol grows in her abilities way too fast with very little restrictions. And Blade felt like he was so much more powerful than any of the other characters he was around, an assassin shouldn't be all powerful rushing through a large crowd of enemies and in fact should be struggling. And the side characters felt underdeveloped and just doing the same things over and over.
I would have to say that while the book had good editing and didn't discover any issues with that. It doesn't really do much to make it original or interesting to a fantasy fan. It uses all the same tropes and ideas that fantasy has been using for years, but doesn't give you any interesting curve balls or characters to make it feel new and interesting.
The ideas never felt like they escaped the realm of generic fantasy tropes I've read many times before. We have a prophecy that involves a dark lord with a massive army and this has happened before in the past. We have the romance trope of not being good enough for the other. The cast runs into a haunted evil castle that has some back story, never does get explained, in order to escape a threat. The dark lords city stays hidden via magical macguffin for thousands of years without issue, until the heros stumble upon it.
At times the characters will escape an event through complete deus ex machina. It feels like he created this location and wanted to use it. But once he wrote the characters into it, he didn't know how to extract the characters. So he just kinda made something work, regardless of it being something that really works logically.
The characters didn't impress me really, Carol grows in her abilities way too fast with very little restrictions. And Blade felt like he was so much more powerful than any of the other characters he was around, an assassin shouldn't be all powerful rushing through a large crowd of enemies and in fact should be struggling. And the side characters felt underdeveloped and just doing the same things over and over.
I would have to say that while the book had good editing and didn't discover any issues with that. It doesn't really do much to make it original or interesting to a fantasy fan. It uses all the same tropes and ideas that fantasy has been using for years, but doesn't give you any interesting curve balls or characters to make it feel new and interesting.