The Immortal Prince

There's something about a lot of Australian fantasy that's very wild and off-the-wall, and I'm starting to love it. This is a beginning to an engaging and promising series that I'm looking forward to finish. It's a very creative secondary world with a magical Tide, controllable by immortals called Tide Lords who rise and subjugate humans during periods of high tide. Our protagonist, the professor Arkady Desean, lives in an era of the Vanishing Tide where reason has reduced belief in the Tide Lords to that of myth. Arkady studies the Crasii, a part-human, part-animal race that we find out the Tide Lords created to be their all-obedient slaves and army. Arkady is brought in to interrogate Cayal, a suicidal Tide Lord who is trying desperately to kill himself after eight thousand years of living.

The whole premise of this is very similar to The Stormlight Archive, to be honest. It's written much earlier, and on a somewhat smaller scale, but we still have Tide Lords (offscreen) displacing an entire ocean and murdering millions of people, and somehow jumping to the moon (I guess we'll get the story of that one in another book). But Fallon's writing is different. It's extremely accessible and readable, but centers on characters rather than diving deep into lore. The characters are rich, although they're your classic hot fantasy heroes: there are about twenty characters worth remembering at the end of the first book, and they're all pretty differentiable in my head. The immortals are delightfully atrocious, and some are even oddly sympathetic in a Byronic sort of way.

I thought this was a really good start to an epic fantasy series that's on the creative side but not too far off the beaten path. Very enjoyable, and looking forward to reading the rest. 8.5/10.