Darien

Finally after suffering reader's block for weeks, I finished this one just before the month ended!!!

Conn Iggulden or C.F. Iggulden, one of the better historical writers, finally has his own fantasy world.........

Maybe because of the block I mentioned or something else, when I read the first few lines of his opening paragraph, I was looking for something captivating, and there it was, a telling of Elias story, no frills, no long winding description of the trail, how the leaves on the surrounding trees were of this colored, while walking some of those would fall lightly........and so forth and so on, I like the way he describes things, to the point with some embellishments, but that dreaded block came about, and much as I tried to read it, it just clutched at my head.......that was why it took me a long time to finish this one......and the story seemed to drag along........

Character wise Mr. Iggulden writes believable protagonists and antagonists, when a new character is introduced, everything is revealed(or almost everything), then you start to like the said characters, only to find that, they were just part of the embellishment (Daw, I really liked him........dang........

First 60% were 10/10, character driven, with some original concepts and good story (felt 90% like reading Abercrombie, just without his more Tarantino-esque humor/over the top occurences). Also good flowing writing and good rhythm.

Unfortunately, the last 30% are quite bad, 4/10 bad and consists only of "action! Action!! ACTION!!!" and bad at that also, since the character development becomes useless or even strongly inconsistent (Nancy) and the author is not good at writing battles, neither at 1st person POV, nor in the tactical view.

Will not read the rest of the series.

Might be useful to mention i read Iggulden before: loved the Genghis series, but disappointed with Lion of Sparta (mediocre to lame) and Dunstan (straight up bad).