Magic's Promise

4 stars. Honestly I went into this with almost no recollection of what happened in the first book and was confused for a great part of it. A lot of explanations and recaps came after the 75% mark which I certainly wish could have been earlier. Overall, though, the book got off from a slightly confusing and very introspective beginning, an exciting middle, and an excellent end.

The thing about these Valdemar's stories is that half the dialogue is MindSpeech, or basically telepathy. That being the case, you not only have entire conversations taking place in italics, but we readers are also very privy to our protagonist Vanyel's every thought and mental soliloquy. I don't feel like I've read a book like this before but I'm not mad. It does get a bit much in the beginning, maybe even the whole first half of the book, where I felt like we were just getting Vanyel lamenting about how tired he was and traveling from place to place catching up with people. That's fine though because it was oddly relatable to my life.

I think things really kicked up a notch in the middle after Tashir is introduced (and the circumstances around that). I gotta say that I had trouble sort of telling apart Tashir and Medren quite often, them both being young boys who are hero-worshipping Vanyel for whatever reasons and for whom Van does good turns.

I really enjoyed the whole ending sequence which I won't spoil here, but especially when Van is presented with a certain choice which is really interesting to me and already makes me want to read the next instalment to see how shit is going to hit the fan.