Steven B. Williams

This turned out to be a very long and tiring read, and by tiring I mean two senses of the word: boring and stressful. Large portions of the book consisted of negligible details and boring dialogues. After some time, those even became quite annoying with every odd statement ending with 'mate' oder 'cheers' - at first it added a quirky but somehow also charming touch, but very soon it crossed the border to 'oh please not again'.

So how can a boring story at the same time be stressful? Well, between all that uninteresting stuff it was hard not to miss the main story-line, but once I got used to skip the unimportant stuff a quite interesting plot revealed itself. The basic concept of the hidden shadow hearts and the evil umbras was truly fascinating, although I missed some more background detail to truly understand everything. Were the dialogues are the weakest part of this book, the action scenes and the fantasy passages are OK. The looming romance between Eric and Alistair with their constant teasing was a nice addition to loosen things up.

Like the needle in a haystack, you have to dig deep to find the essential story hidden beneath a huge pile of fillers. This book could easily be condensed and edited into a quite captivating fantasy novel. However, in its current state it just left me exhausted and disappointed.

(Thanks to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for a copy of the book, all opinions are my own)