This review and many others, both german and english, can also be found on my blog.

Diese und viele weitere Rezensionen, auf deutsch und englisch, findet ihr auch auf meinem Blog.

Ravenclaw Threadsister

Another Epic-Fantasy adventure that I listened to on audio. In this case I was slightly disappointed with the narration, as I had trouble distinguishing between the different characters and it always took me some time to realize a time-jump had happened, because there was no pause in the narration.

Other than that, the book was great. The writing doesn’t come up to the same level as Rothfuss’ in ‘The name of the wind’, to which I’ve seen this one compared, but it’s still great.
What the book ‘lacks’ in lyrical prowess it makes up with plot and story-telling.

This is only the second book/series I’ve read that has a narrator. In this case it is our protagonist who tells his story to a historian.
As I said, there are quite a few time-jumps, which helps keeps the story fast-paced, yet spanning more than a decade.
The plot is very interesting and kept me engaged the whole time. It had quite a bit of adventure, some magic mixed in and a whole lot of fighting.
Because of the time-jumps and my problems with distinguishing the voices I had some trouble keeping the plot straight time-wise, but it wasn’t that much of a problem.
The structure of the order and it’s diffrences to the more ‘worldly’soldiers was interesting to see and I loved seeing out hero juggle his roles in both the fate and as a Sword of the Realm.

While we learned a lot about Vaelin, our main character, I didn’t feel like we got to know him very well, most of what we learned about him or his feelings and motivations seemed a bit superficial. I still liked him and enjoyed witnessing his journey.
What I also liked was that while he certainly has skills that go beyond those of most men, he wasn’t without flaws. Especially during the early years and his training with the order it was clear that he wasn’t simply the best in everything he did. He is a born leader, very powerful, cunning and almost unbeatable with a sword, but there are other skills in which his brothers outshine him.
He is also capable of doing magic, but as it is considered ‘dark’ he hardly uses it consciously.
I really hope we’ll see more of it in the future books.

In the end I only rated it 4 out of 5 stars, but I’m pretty sure the rating will rise with the other books on the series.