T L Greylock

Actual Rating 4.5
Well written with immediately likable characters, Shadows of Ivory is an unusual fantasy in its archeological focus and it utilizes this focus to good effect and degree without it ever crossing over in the boring or the too much.
Or MC, Eska, is likable, complex, and wonderfully intelligent and you fully understand how she commands the loyalty she does throughout the book. She confront a great variety of challenges, perils, and conflicts throughout and resolves them in a show more variety of ways. I also particularly enjoyed her friendship with the librarian (who's name escapes me) and I wished we had more of these.
The secondary characters are equally solid and well conceived.
The world building is solid and promises to be better as we unearth more of the magic and the history as the story continues.
The plot is excellent and well paced, and does a good job of varying itself up and presenting the readers with curve ball or sudden shifts. A potentially criticism is that it does not achieve a whole lot though; one minor plot point is introduce and resolved, and the rest is mostly just settling the readers into the larger plot. show less

Good world-building and engaging characters. I particularly like that the protagonist is a sort of "scientist hero" whose trade skills are as much use to her and in driving the plot than are the more traditional adventure tropes. The plot was absorbing and made good use of the interaction of characters, landscape and history. Only quibbles were some of the dialog feeling unnatural, and (specific to the print edition) a weird kerning issue with the "a" characters throughout which left a gap show more which looked at times like a word break. I look forward to reading the next volume! show less

Lost something more like

From the title I was expecting tales of mages & sages, alchemy & Lore. While not technically bad, they're pretty banal, & very mundane. Imagine Shannara or the Shire, but with NO magic, no beasties, no mystics & No strange races. I looked for Xanth and found MUNDANIA

Quite a mixture of stories, but a good way to explore and sample the wealth of new authors in fantasy. It was free too!