Blood Song

First off, I highly enjoyed this. It is another coming of age tale, so fits with a lot of the fantasy tropes, but it is told in such an engaging way with such good world building that any derivation in the story fades into the background. Our protagonist has been sent to join some martial order, and we follow his progression through the school and eventual appointment by the king to lead his armies.

There are some really clever and unusual literary stylisations here. The chronicler style of story telling is increasingly popular in speculative fiction. Blood Song opens with that chronicle style - we meet our narrator and get him introduced to our protagonist. Blood Song however subverts this. You begin to realize that although there is an apparent narrator, the voice telling the story is actually the protagonist, and the narrator himself is only hearing part of what is being written. An interestingly meta situation where we now have an unreliable narrator, yet the story is being told is complete. This is the first book in a trilogy and yet feels remarkably complete - all the plot items alluded to in the chronicle do come to pass in this first book. It will be interesting to see how this is continued in the second book.

This story falls into the Grimdark category by my reckoning. There is a large degree of moral ambiguity and a lot of violence. The politics portrayed here are interesting - the Machiavellian manipulations of the political actors are well thought through.

A very promising first book. I have read several of Anthony Ryan's short stories before but this is the first of his full novels. I look forward to the rest of the series!

Executive Summary: I really loved this book, and I highly recommend it.Audio book: I'm a little torn on the narration. Steven Brand is a pretty good narrator. He does accents and inflections to really add something to the story. However, he's so DAMN QUIET. It seemed like he was whispering half the time. I'm not sure if it's him or simply the quality of the production, but it seems like it's just the way he reads.I listen to audiobooks on my phone. Sometimes with headphones, sometimes with the speaker, sometimes plugged into my car. I find audiobooks to be too quiet in general, but this was a real struggle in places.To me he's more of the type of person I'd love to listen to tell me a story around a campfire than over an audiobook. Yet he's still better than a lot of readers out there and I'll likely continue going the audiobook route with this series despite the volume issue.Full ReviewWriting reviews for books I love goes one of two ways: They either come gushing out of me because I'm so excited to share my love with everyone, or I struggle to put my thoughts into words, afraid of not doing the book justice. I worry this will be more of the latter than the former.I generally don't give out 5 star ratings. I like to save them for books I really love so it's a sign that “hey Rob must have really liked this one”. I don't exactly have a metric for what pushes a 4/4.5 star book to 5 star rating. It just sort of by feel.The easiest way for me to quantify it though is that it's a book that I hate to stop and can't wait to pick up again. This book was easily that. It was also an easy add to my favorites shelf.This book didn't grab me immediately, but pretty close. Once it did it never let go. It's hard to say why I loved it so much. It's a typical chosen one story. It's also got a bit of the school trope to it, though that's only part of the book.At first it reminds me a lot of [b:The Name of the Wind 186074 The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle, #1) Patrick Rothfuss https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1270352123s/186074.jpg 2502879]. Our main protagonist is an infamous man whose collected numerous names over the years, and is recounting his life story to a chronicler as a flashback, with occasional interludes back to present day. Sound Familiar?However this basic structure is really where the similarity ends for me. Vaelin is a paladin (or maybe warrior monk?), where Kvothe is a bard (at least in my mind). He's far from perfect, and was instantly more likable to me.I think what really hooked me in the story is the mystery and lore. There is a lot to discover in both the history of the Order that Vaelin is now a member, but also surrounding magic, regarded with superstition, anger and fear and referred to by most as “The Dark”. The magic is sort of not that prevalent for most of the book, nor all that well explained, but I enjoyed how Mr. Ryan incorporated it into the story.The other thing I really enjoyed is all the politics and religion. Religion and politics are tightly coupled and “The Faith” of the Order is embedded in the rule of the Unified Realm. Like the real world arguments over religion and politics lead to conflict and war.King Janus is determined to leave a legacy for his son, and will use Vaelin how he sees fit to accomplish it.The cast of characters felt well developed and balanced. Coming from different backgrounds and parts of the realm, Vaelin and his brothers make for an interesting group, each excelling at certain skills honed through training rather than just excelling at EVERYTHING. We also have a few strong female characters, although they don't really take center stage in this book.Overall I think this book just put a lot of my favorites parts of fantasy tropes together in a way that just hits my buttons in the right way and made it a great read for me. The writing seems really polished for a first novel. I'm sure there are things that can be picked apart about the story or the writing, but I just don't want to hear them. I will end my ramblings hoping that I have I have convinced you to check out this series. I had people telling me over a year ago to pick this book up, and I wish I had listened. It took getting a review copy of [b:Tower Lord 18138189 Tower Lord (Raven's Shadow, #2) Anthony Ryan https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1382486392s/18138189.jpg 25481154] to finally pick it up and I've eagerly jumped right into that book.You made it through my ramblings? Why are you still reading this review? You should be reading the book instead. Seriously. Go now.

This book falls into a category that I particularly despise, which I describe as ‘the ordinary life of an extraordinary guy'. It starts by describing how incredible famous and bad ass the protagonist is in the first 1-2 pages, and it proceeds by telling how he came to be that way through the rest of the book.

And being a typical fantasy book, there is usually no much creativity in that aspect: the hero went to an isolated fighting/magic/assassin school when we was still a boy, and there he trained every hour of every day. And his teachers were cruel. And nobody liked him. And he hated that place. But slowly he began to understand the teachers better, make some friends and overall, liking the place.

Still, I really made an effort and the story did have some interesting events along the way. The problem is it's SO TERRIBLY SLOW! I can get past reading about how he put his shoes one foot at a time, then washes his face, then have breakfast, and every other insignificant detail of his everyday life. Just DON'T MAKE IT TAKE PAGES TO DESCRIBE THAT! REALLY!

I stopped reading soon after have read a few pages regarding how they learned how to make weapons.

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