The Pariah

DNF at 54%. Generally, I am not a big fan of the main character telling his own story. Why? Because it almost feels like we are waiting to get to the cool part. I know he is not going to rot in a prison forever. There must be something much cooler waiting for him if he was meant to have his story told, right? There has to be a point. A good 300+ pages in, the point is still not revealed. The fact that this one has a single POV doesn't help with the feeling that I am wasting my time. Being realistic here, hardly any story where every moment is super exciting. I am not going to blame an author for that, real life isn't exciting every day either. But this one... Alvyn is just waiting to escape from every situation so far. It all feels like filler content, the bridge to the cool things. But how many hundreds of pages do I have to read to get at least a little payoff? The talk about martyrs and religion and impending cosmic doom tells me there is big stuff. Big enemies, monumental conflicts. Yet we are fucking around with Alwyn doing meaningless things with a lot of descriptions. What was the use of describing some totally meaningless priest character?? Who cares? Especially because honestly, all of the characters die without any meaningful bond or a way for us to develop empathy for them. Even when they are Alwyn's friends, we never see any of that. We are told that “X character is stuck in this boring situation with Alwyn and they want to escape”. Never seen sharing a good moment. Just being told they were stuck in the same shitty place for years. Because so far, this book is “Escape: The Novel”. They do nothing, but wait around to escape a shitty situation. Just to do the same in another crappy, boring place. I have had my issues with the prison part of [b:The Ember Blade 34673711 The Ember Blade (The Darkwater Legacy, #1) Chris Wooding https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490348335l/34673711.SY75.jpg 55844744], but at least we got the best character there. But here, we got what? Toria? Who literally never does anything, just mopes? Sometimes the characters have plot armour and that makes things weightless. But here, it's the exact opposite. I know nobody of these characters will actually last, because hey, none of them do. We will just wipe the whole thing, I will have to remember 10 new people, who will also get wiped. Without any consequences. Can anyone tell me why Alwyn needed multiple religious criminal characters in his life? Did we need them to be different people? Did it make a difference? No. Not even a little. So really, just read Draconis Memoria by the same author, that one was fun. This? Boring. Slow.

As my first book by Anthony Ryan, I never know what to expect and if I'm going to jive with their writing style. But I am pleased to say we jive very well. He finds a balance between grim, brutal battles, and sly humour. Much like his main character, I found myself grinning a lot through this book. It's a bit of a slow burn, but has fantastic pay offs. As someone who's halfway through the second book in this trilogy, I can look back and see just how much The Pariah sets the stage. So if you like stories with underdog's, gruesome battles, political intrigue and a smart ass hero (anti-hero?), then this is your jam.

I started reading in the library while the kids were doing a crafting thing, and 55 pages in I knew that I had to take the book out and finish it. Halfway in and it's even better.

Finished. Can't wait to read the next one - an absolute blast (and I love the way Ryan has taken real events and people from history and myth and mixed them together into a kind of fantasy stew).

I received an ARC for this in June. It took me an extremely long time to read and I ended up buying it on audio as a deal and finishing it that way. My biggest problem with it is that you absolutely should NOT read the summary of the book. Everything that is mentioned in the summary doesn't happen until 45% through the book and it just crushes momentum. I've seen other reviews say the same thing, so it's definitely not just me that was affected by this. It felt like the entire first 20% felt like it could have been reduced to a prologue or just been done through exposition.

I kept waiting for the actual story to begin. Even after the 45% mark, I never felt like the MC takes an active role in his own story. It's just things that happen to him. The battle/fight scenes were well done, but mostly this book just failed to make any impact on me. I'm reading Bloodsong next month and I'm pretty hopeful that it will be better! 5/10