★★★☆☆
I actually can’t remember how I came by this book, whether it was one I picked up at a library book sale or one I acquired from the recommendations on Goodreads and bought from BetterWorldBooks. I don’t remember! But it had been on my TBR list for quite some time.
I wanted something fairly light and quick to read, because the year is winding down and I’m doing fairly poorly on my reading challenge, [66/122!] So, I picked up this book.
We know that Gen is a thief who is imprisoned when we first meet him, that the King’s scholar, has an inkling as to where an ancient artifact might be, a real game changer for whoever possesses it. This is where we open ourselves and to be honest the first half and then some is fairly non action packed. It IS NOT fast paced, it crawls because it’s just chattering back and forth where they pick up camp, camp, pick up camp, camp… Squabble, pick up camp.
What held my interest was purely Gen and his smart mouth and humor which made me chuckle.
The history about the gods and mythology of the book was filler to me, lots of info dropping, [possibly setting up for deeper stories down the line,] and again… it just kind of began to tread water for me.
We don’t really pick up or become interesting until you’re nearly finished with the book and then it does become a page turner, you begin to want to know what happens when they reach their goal. Things begin to unfold and if you’ve read reviews you’re expecting a twist, but if you’re like me you were rolling your eyes kind of like “yeah, right… a twist would be not setting up camp and moving or squabbling…” but more than that happens.
Boom, the ending is rather surprising and leaves us at a good ending to begin the next book.
All in all, it was a fairly quick, decent read.. and it is worth a solid 3 and possibly a 3.5 simply for the ending. I would recommend this book to people who enjoy quicker, smaller fantasy reads.
Book Savvy Reviews 