Seven Deaths of an Empire

Man, talk about a cover pick. There???s a style of cover art that uses the distinct paint strokes to build up the art and get a textured feel that just makes me want to pick the book up immediately.

There???s Roman influences in the structure of the army and it???s the most I???ve enjoyed any Roman influenced fantasy. I just don???t get a long with it. The setting was built up fairly minimally and done through conversation mostly so you built up a wider picture in little chunks. I thought that was a good balance to strike considering how little the setting plays a part in the story.

The dialogue felt overly stiff and formal for how well characters knew each other. And then there were moments when I couldn???t believe things happened for any reason other than the plot requiring it, like torturers giving information away freely while trying to interrogate someone. C???mon man. The character felt like they were mostly just designed to fit the plot rather than having layers and feeling more real.

I had a fun time reading Seven Deaths of an Empire, it was a cool premise. I was hooked quite early on but unfortunately it didn???t end up a hit for me.

I received a copy from Rebellion Publishing in exchange for an honest review.

I thought the book looked grander in scale than it actually ended up being. We had only two different POVs, both of which were different enough and served their purpose in being a bit more personal and developing their side of the world. (Which I like!) I switched a few times between the two when it came to which POV I was interested in the most. At the start it was Bordan, then in the middle it switched to Kyron and so on. They both had their high points and their lower points.

The story itself was interesting, but it had an incredibly slow start. It took me about halfway to really warm up to it, and I was pretty invested by the time I hit the 80% mark, but because of that it took me ages just to get to that halfway point.

I scoff a bit when I hear people's reviews of something being “I know the start is pretty so-so, but it gets good later, I promise!” which is often something I don't agree with. In this case though, I would say it's true. Not that the start is so-so at all, it's just slow, but as long as you're semi-interested in the characters and what's going on around them, the road to the end is going to pay off. It isn't as straightforward as it appears to be.

Certainly a promising start!