Book of Days by Sara Reinke

Submit Your Own Review

 

I started to read 'Book of days' with mixed feeling. After I have just completed an article about the best fantasy book I thought that I will be disappointed by this one. But fortunately after reading a few chapters I realized that the author deserves to be published and that the book is at least as good as the ones from 'The forgotten realms' setting.

The author certainly has rough talent but it can be easily seen that it lacks experience. Even if the book is somehow boring at the beginning it gets better and better as it progresses. Somewhere at the middle of it I found myself captivated by the beautiful writing of Sara Reinke. Even if I do not consider it a masterpiece I have been gripped by the action of the novel.

The action is a classic one. The rightful king of the realm is slain by his brother that has sold his soul to an evil witch. His children are kidnapped from the usurper hands before he can kill them. There is a prophecy saying that one of the saved kids will slain the usurper and will bring his dark reign to an end.

The main characters of the book will start a quest to save the foster father of one of the two children. After a long series of adventures they get to the final battle between the good and the evil. As usual the good prevails and we will happily wait for the next entry in the series (it seems that there will be two more books in the world of 'Book of days').

The novel is an easy read with a predictable end and a strong romance story on the background. The author has the talent to present quite a few believable scenes and I could see how the writing style improves as she is writing the book. So I am quite confident that the next ones will be better.

The bad parts? Well, the world does not have depth. Sometimes I feel that I am reading a theater script, we have the characters, we have the scene and we have the dialogs. But we do not have the world surrounding them. There are no things happening outside the characters. The history is almost non-existent. There are no cities in the land, there are no other forces beside the colliding ones.

The characters do not act real. If you catch your son sneaking out from your house going to the disco in the middle of the night you ground him for a month, you don’t go there with him. Also people generally do not want to help you without any benefit when they can die in the endeavor.

The book is a long list of clichés starting with the races and the plot. The reader can see that the author is heavily influenced by the Forgotten Realms series, which is not a bad thing if you just enter into the fantasy area. However, if you are an ‘experienced’ reader and you want something ‘deep’ it is better to skip this book because it won’t offer anything new to you. If you want something easy and relaxing to read between some other books you can try it, if you can get over the first four –five chapters.

To sum things up it ‘Book of Days’ is a pleasant experience and being the debut novel of the author it shows a real progress from the first chapter to the final one.

Egomancer

Sponsor ads