Tuesday, December 26, 2017

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Emperor's Blades (Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne #1) by Brian Staveley





The Emperor's Blades is the first in Brian Staveley's epic fantasy trilogy, Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne.  I didn't come into this series without any foreknowledge, as I read and reviewed (see HERE) Staveley's prequel novel, Skullsworn earlier this year.  I liked Skullsworn a lot - it was a nicely done gray world with some really interesting characters - and have been looking forward to reading the trilogy for a while to see more of this world.  Alas, The Emperor's Blade fails to live up quite so much to the standards of its later prequel, as it suffers from some fairly solid pacing issues.  There's definite potential here in the worldbuilding, but the book takes too long to get to obvious places to really fulfill that potential:

More after the jump:


-----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
Ages ago, the race known as the Csestriim fought a war against the young race known as Humanity, and disappeared from the world, with the Csestriim fading into the annals of myth.

Now, one of the mightiest empires of humanity is the Annurian Empire, whose rulers are known for having eyes seemingly kissed by fire, a sign of their chosen status by one of the gods.  The current Emperor has three children:
The oldest, the daughter Adare, who cannot rule due to her sex but who has been trained in Imperial politics;
The heir, his son Kaden, who has been sent to a monastery of monks in isolation who preach the importance of a state of emptying ones' mind;
The youngest, son Valyn, is in training to become a member of the Kettral, special forces for the Empire who ride on winged creatures.

But when the Emperor is assassinated in a strange closed door visit to the Temple of the Goddess, things change: Adare is named a Minister in her father's will and seeks vengeance on her father's murderer; Valyn learns of a conspiracy among the military and even amongst his fellow Kettral to kill not only the Emperor but also the Emperor's heirs.

But Kaden, isolated from the civilized world at the monastery is unable to learn any of this, even as the forces that killed his father threaten to take him next: instead he faces what might the most frightening thing of all, a mysterious creature that is killing the creatures around the monastery, the likes of which have never been seen in hundreds of years....
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The Emperor's Blades' best attribute is its worldbuilding - it truly does an excellent job describing this Epic Fantasy world and setting up the plot.  The Kettral are hardly a new concept (Fantasy soldiers on griffins or Fantasy special forces are not uncommon), but they're described excellent so you can really see how they work, and the reveal about their specialty late in book is certainly interesting.  Similarly, the monastery is hardly a new concept (Kaden is basically in Jedi training to some extent, even if he doesn't have any powers of telepathy/telekinesis) but it is extremely well done.  The minor characters in each part of the setting are similarly well done, which really helps this book set up the world for the rest of the trilogy.

That said, while the setup and worldbuilding present some excellent potential, the story has some massive issues with pacing.  I mentioned only two of the settings of this book in this last paragraph, and if you'll notice I mentioned 3 main characters in the plot summary.  That's because the third main character, Adare, who tries to avenge her father in the capital, gets like 6 chapters to her brothers' evenly divided 44.  It's very easy to forget she exists and it's hard to care about her when a lot happens in her brothers' stories between each time we get an update on her own.

And even within Kaden and Valyn's stories, there are pacing issues up the wazoo, mainly with Valyn.  Valyn's story starts with him being told of the conspiracy and the knowledge that at least one if not more of this fellow Kettral are part of the conspiracy and might be trying to kill him, and then possibly his brother.  The next 80% of the story is his training while trying to figure out who is behind the threat, and during that training he faces several trials, usually directly against several other trainees who are, to put it nicely, jerks.  With the exception of the main test, he fails each and every one of these trials and almost dies repeatedly.   The end result is that this serious situation starts to feel very comical pretty quickly (if you followed me on twitter you may have seen me remark on it), while Valyn isn't really making much progress toward hunting the conspiracy (the progress is finally made in the final 20% of his story).

Kaden's storyline is better paced, but struggles mainly because well, when it's kind of clear from the genre that when a character is struggling to train to use a skill throughout, he's going to learn how to do it by the ending.  There isn't too much surprise in where this is going (this is true for much of this book actually) and Kaden isn't a particularly interesting character enough to make up for the lack of suspense.  At one point, the main character from the prequel Skullsworn shows up, and it just reminded me how much better of a character she was (incidentally, if you are like me and have read Skullsworn before this novel, this character showing up will be amusing, as this book features a mystery around her identity that will be already known to raders of the prequel).

The ending of this book generally resolves all 3 plots, while also posing cliffhangers to some degree that the next book in the trilogy will surely use to continue the story.  It's done decently enough.  And again, the potential is there, so I might wind up continuing with the series.  But it may depend on what else I have on my plate to see if I get to it.

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