A review by cdonegan
The Shadow of What Was Lost by James Islington

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

I really wanted to like this book. The lore was interesting but the execution lost me. The writing of the female characters wasn’t great—not “she breasted boobily down the stairs” level of badness, but I can only think of two times in this entire book that two women spoke to each other in a significant way. I swear every single woman was described as “attractive” when introduced, usually with that exact word. It made me want to scream every time!

I barely understood the motivation of most of the characters because it just wasn’t shown to us. They seemed to just react to things happening around them for most of the book, rather than taking real action themselves. Minor characters also didn’t stand out to me, making it hard to remember who people were. The book also kept a lot of things hidden from the reader, not in a way that would be satisfying to figure out later on in the book, but rather in a way that just left me lost and confused many times.

Overall, I guess enjoyed it enough to read 700 pages of it, but not enough to continue on with the trilogy. It had the potential to be great but it was a miss for me.
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