Review: 'The Awakened, Book Three' by Jason Tesar

Again, the opening is present day, but this episode is not nearly so interesting as in the first two books. Where is Adair? He's an important character, presumably waiting to be revealed to his grieving wife, so it would be sensible to remind readers of his existence straight away.

After this, the story picks up more or less where it left off in Book Two, and immediately takes off at a rapid pace which never lets up. The plot is actually the best part of the book - everything that happens follows logically, with some nice twists and turns, lots of exciting encounters and a neat and tidy resolution. The final battle for Orud is rather well thought out, bringing together Kael's talents, Saba's knowledge, Maeryn's resistence fighters and Dacien's army quite neatly, although Dacien is an improbably clever military commander and Kael is simply unstoppable (but then this is fantasy). Only Aelia remains as useless as ever (unlikely romance notwithstanding). She was a plot point early in Book One, but spent the rest of the story as barely-remembered baggage. The author could easily have made Maeryn a more interesting character by killing off Aelia.  The ending is rather implausible, with a setup for a sequel or Book Four.

But despite all the high-speed action, sadly it left me quite uninterested. This is largely because of the author's rather flat writing style, which wipes almost all emotion from his characters. Sometimes he tells us what a character is feeling or that he or she is crying, but it all seems very distant and unengaging, as if he is simply telling the story in a rather perfunctory way. This is a shame, because these are potentially interesting characters involved in dramatic events, but the impact is lost.

The other problem is that the author never bothers to give any descriptions of his long-standing characters, or the places we've seen before. This, too, tends to make them vague and uninteresting. Where he does describe a scene (for instance, the bridges connecting Leoran to the shore), it immediately makes the setting more vivid and memorable. And while he summarises some of the previous books' events, it would have been immeasurably helpful to have a decent reminder of important returning characters, like Soren, Donagh and Coen. Having a little less of the frenetic rushing about by armies and navies, and a little more reflective remembering of Kael's time in training with these people would have brought the whole story alive.

Overall, the poor characterisations and uninvolving writing style are a disappointment, but the quality of the plot raises this to 3 stars. [First written August 2011]

Review: 'The Awakened, Book Two' by Jason Tesar

WARNING: some spoilers below!

Book 1 had a great deal of promise, so I was looking forward to the second installment. This too has an excellent opener - in fact, the same opener, just seen from a different perspective. This is fascinating, and immediately answers two questions raised by the previous book - now we know what happened to Adair, and yes, this really is a case of parallel or alternate worlds, with the secret temple at sea acting as some kind of portal. And the cliffhanger from Book One is resolved straight away, too - Kael survived, although there is no indication of how.

Then it's back to Bastul, where we are immediately plunged into a story more action-packed and fast paced than its predecessor. The city (and in fact the whole Orudan Empire) is under attack from the barbarian Syvaku, for reasons unknown, and is soon destroyed, while Lemus meets an appropriate end. Maeryn is forced to become a leader to the freed slaves, while also protecting her now grown daughter Aelia. Kael joins forces with retreating soldier Dacien, using the skills he learned from his life in the monastery.

As the two groups, Maeryn's slaves and Kael's soldiers, traverse the countryside, we get to see some more of the author's created world. Like many other fantasy writers, his world seems to be peculiarly empty, with just a few widely scattered cities, and virtually no other signs of life, particularly farms, until we get to Orud, the capital.

After such a good opening, the middle section was a huge disappointment. A great deal happens to Maeryn and Kael, but somehow it is made to seem dull. The details of how Kael survived and what happened to him afterwards make a terrific story, but we hear it only in flashback during a journey more than halfway through the book. The plot is actually rather good, but the writing style serves to distance the reader. There's far too much that we are simply told, so that, however dramatic the story, it's not in the least emotionally involving. Maeryn's story, in particular, is incredibly flat - she goes to Orud, she gets everything she wants, she and her daughter are given a home, treated as favourites by Magnus, she begins to have feelings for him - but none of this is remotely engaging. We are never given a reason why Magnus is so solicitous.

None of the characters are particularly interesting - or particularly believable, come to that. I really don't care about any of them. Maeryn has been through some trying experiences, but we get no real sense of suffering. Aelia serves no useful purpose. Kael is a little too good a warrior. Magnus is too oily. Saba is certainly interesting, but we don't see enough of him. Dacien - well, I do find him interesting, but he's far too willing to be nice to Kael, given his suspicions of him, so he seems like just a plot device.

Another problem is that numerous characters from the past turn up without much to remind the reader who they are. Some of them I thought were dead! If a (relatively minor) character from book 1 turns up two thirds of the way through book 2 at a dramatic moment, we need some help to remember them, otherwise it's just confusing.

The end becomes quite dramatic, with some nice twists. I'm not sure that it totally makes sense (an appointed emperor? who frees slaves in order to create an army??), but it still kept me turning the pages. The plot is still excellent, but the characters simply don't shine.

After the promise of book 1, this was a real let down. I will probably read the third book, partly because I've already bought it, and partly because the portal to the present day earth is such an intriguing one and I want to know what happens to Adair. But beyond that, my interest is practically non-existent. Two stars. [First written June 2011]

Review: 'The Awakened, Book One' by Jason Tesar

This is the author's debut work, published in three parts (called Book One, Book Two and Book Three, and isn't that better than inventing meaningless titles?). These are all cheap downloads, and even better value as a combined volume, which is how I read it.

The opening is intriguing - an apparently present-day encounter with someone from another time (or world), and then we are plunged into a standard fantasy scenario, a ruling family is a great city, which is fragmented by events. The father disappears, the son is essentially kidnapped to train as a follower of the All Powerful god, and the mother is left to survive a number of difficulties back home. We follow several characters initially, but not all of them are there for the long haul, so it is a little hard to know who the story is really about. There are obviously some strange things going on, and the action scenes are dramatic and very tense - I particularly enjoyed Adair's race through the strange structure beyond the reef.

World building is fairly sketchy. Certain locations are described in almost too much detail (we don't need actual measurements of rooms, or how one room connects to another, unless it's relevant to the plot), but others are hardly touched on at all. There is very little sense of what the city of Bastul is like, for instance, apart from a vague sense of a warm-climate Romanesque lifestyle with dark-skinned slaves, while the people of the monastery are almond-eyed eastern types with a disciplined, austere lifestyle. There are also some primitive people, with bones through their noses. This is all sadly stereotyped.

If there is overt magic in this created world, it is not obvious, although there is clearly some strangeness - a crossover from the fantasy world to what appears to be our own world. There are also gods somewhere in the background. I rather like this kind of subtlety.

The characters are a little difficult to believe in, being rather too black and white, evil or nice (Lemus is particularly overdrawn). I felt they all needed some more backstory and depth, especially Maeryn, Adair and Lemus, and with Kael I was not even sure how old he was, an important detail. Having so little background makes characters' motivations hard to understand, so sometimes major things just seemed to happen without rhyme or reason. A little more subtlety and greyness in the characters would have improved the book immensely.

The prose is a little clunky at times, but there are few typos and only occasional grammatical errors. There is perhaps too much descriptive writing, and the dialogue fails to bring the characters fully to life, but it is all very easy to read, and the reader is never left wondering exactly what is going on (sometimes why, but never what). One minor annoyance: my Kindle version had every mention of Bastul and a few other places hyperlinked to the maps at the back. This is useful the first time, and after that is just distracting.

The pacing is good at first, with racy passages interspersed with more introspective sections. However, once Kael begins his training, the descriptions become a little too long and detailed, and could be over-slow for some readers. Things pick up again just before the end, with a slightly melodramatic cliff-hanger.

There are some seriously unconvincing plot contrivances. Adair, for instance, is the ruler of a major city, yet he decides to take off on a secret mission of his own. And why exactly was Bahari so important to him anyway? Why was the Council so quick to replace him? Then there was Maeryn and Lemus - I really found the legal position unbelievable (I can't think of any real-world equivalent), so that needed some elaboration, to say the least. Some more detail of Maeryn's feelings would have helped here. The subplot dealing with the rebels, in fact almost all of Maeryn's story, feels as if it is setup for events in the later books, and it just never seems to get going.

But having said all that, I found the story extremely readable - I just kept on turning the pages to find out what happened next, and that, after all, is what everyone looks for in a story. Only some minor quibbles over plot and characterisation hold this back from being a very good debut work. It is a good 3.5 star effort, so on the assumption that things will fall into place in the later books in the series, I will give this 4 stars. And so on to Book Two... [First written June 2011]