The Savior's Champion

Sorry Jenna.

I liked the length of the book and read through it quickly because I wanted to find out more about the plot and the world. The challenges were a mixed bag. Some were interesting while others very obvious, some were not that imaginative where I might had seen something similar in a made for cable movie.

I don't read fantasy anymore, so I was fine if you didn't fit into some of the established patterns of the genre, such as not describing your magic system at all. I'm also not into romance so some of the predictable plot points were okay with me since I haven't read them 100 times before.

My only real complaint is Jenna writes men as she imagines they must talk privately when women aren't around. Sorry, we might think with our dicks sometimes but we don't actively talk about them as if they were some independent part of our selves where our sense of identity is kept. Guys who do talk about their dicks like that in front of other guys are few and far in between because that gets you shunned: it's silly and pathetic. I realize that my view is a contemporary western/American view point, but that brings me to another thing I didn't like. The dialogue was very modern. While that helped make the characters approachable, it also made me think of the characters as contemporary people, almost like a group of people larping. The line ‘worst armor ever' made me think of Simpsons comic book guy, which was immersion breaking.

I'm not going to comment too much on the characters. Tobias was fine, except a bit too ‘perfect' in his relationship with Leila. It felt like some wish fulfillment going on here, but perhaps that's an element of romance novels, don't know-don't care. Leila was fine, beautiful woman who is secretly a deadly bad ass, but nothing new there either. The erotic or sex dream scenes were okay, but seemed like they were in there for either shock or to keep the reader interested. Since I'm not a romance reader I don't know how they were supposed to be, but they came off as tame and the fact that ‘nothing really happened' between the love interests was disappointing.

Overall, the story was ‘meh'. The fact that Tobias would get seriously injured, but still be able to fight reminded me this was a story that had a plot to get through. If it was all good because of healing magic, then the magic needed to be explained more, perhaps with limitations. I get that there is a lot of hidden things driving the story on Leila's side which will be the focus of the second book. I doubt I'll read it.