4.5 StarsThis book has everything that I look for in my fantasy novels. Incredibly dark and dirty. Our heroes are not really good guys even though they are the protagonists of this adventure. I have never read anything from Tim Lebbon but I am now a big fan. This book is not for the feint of heart, and it's grisly violence will turn some off. If you cannot deal with innocents being maimed and murdered then you need to stay way from this book. Trey, Kosar, Ameer, and Rafe are all likable protagonists as was Hope. These are not your typical band of brothers out on a quest to save the world. The cast is made up of a disgraced thief, a witch that is also a hoar, a miner that is not a normal human, a farm boy, and a librarian. There stories are all individual and unique, yet they are brought together as the fate of the world unfolds before them. They are faced with the return of magic into their world. They come together as they flee for their lives.The backstory of each character adds depth to the characters and makes it easier for us to relate with them. The world building involving the tales of the past and the cataclysm of the war with the mages is all top notch. There are plenty of great chase scenes, action, sword fights, and killings. The red monks are truly scary bad ass dudes and the opening chapter of this book will show you just how bad they can be. Lebbon's writing is colorful and often filled with depth and detail. I really enjoyed his prose.""Mage shit, it's really here." The tattoos on Hope's face were in flux, shifting and moving as her emotions swat yes from fear to elation, delight to terror. Here was the living future, and the dead past. This boy was more myth than reality, a story so rare that she had never heard it told other than by her own mother and grandmother. Magic is destined to return, they had said, and it will be in a child unbirthed, offspring of the womb of the land in darkest Kang Kang."This is a fairly fast paced book that had very few flaws to me. There are a few predictable twists that slightly detract from it's excellence. The ending which is not really an ending was a bit too unclimactic to me, it felt like it was forced. The threads of this story did not get the type of ending that I thought they deserved. Overall, a really fun dark fantasy that Joe Abercrombie would find likable. I will move on to Dawn now as I really want to see how this unfolds... Great Stuff..
I wasn't even able to finish this, got two thirds into it--barely. This was the worst book I've read in a long time, and a huge disappointment. This book was all around bad in every area.Characters were all unoriginal and stale with zero development. most seemed pointless to the plot. They didn't even have a good reason to end up with each other when they finally did.The plot was uber boring and could be summarized in one paragraph. There was excessive time spent on description of pointless things in the environment that did not add to the setting at all and instead seemed like attempts to pad the weak plot with extra pages.This was like slogging through mud for me with no end in sight. It's not often I abandon a story in the middle but sometimes you have to cut your losses.I suspect those who like this book are those who like "gritty" fantasy just because of the fact that's it's "not for kids" and aren't really judging the book for its actual content.
Do You like book Dusk (2007)?
My goal to finish every book I start feels like noble determination some days, and masochism on other. This book placed it squarely in the latter. Despite the interesting genre mashup of horror and fantasy, and the effusive praise from reviewers and other writers I respect plastering the front and back covers, Dusk was almost unreadable. The prose was clunky and amateurish, the characters thin and derivative, and the horror or adult elements were laughably shoehorned into a dull and hackneyed pl
—Cameron
This is an extremely dark fantasy tale. It was a somewhat difficult read because I had to walk away from it from time to time. I couldn't read more than about 40 pages in one sitting. With that caveat, however, I must say that it is a very *good* book. Tim Lebbon has a talent for bringing the setting to life and for making the characters multi-faceted. In some scenes, you could smell the mud in the streets, see the texture of the stone buildings. Very visual.If you're looking for happy endings, or rather, endings in which everything is tied up neatly and nicely, you're going to want to take a pass on this one. But if you want something gritty and sometimes hard to digest, but entertaining, nonetheless, give it a try. But don't say I didn't warn you about the darkness! :)
—Venessa
Okayyyy...I was expecting a lot more from this book than it delivered. Many of the elements you want in a good fantasy novel were there - magic hating monks all in red killing indiscriminately in order to halt the return of magic to the world; ancient mages in exile with fanatical followers determined to grab any returning magic for themselves; a thief; a warrior woman; a witch; a fledge miner (a drug mined underground like coal); and a librarian (yes a librarian). So, who could imagine that all these elements would fail to ignite my enthusiasm and frankly leave me pretty cool about it - to the extent that I blatantly skipped whole chunks of dull dialogue and superfluous descriptions of people's pasts - I won't be getting the sequel.
—Gary
