Col Buchanan

Dark, beautiful, ugly, gorgeous and honest. This book gleefully reeled me in with vivid characters and then joyfully stomped my heart into itty, bitty, teeny, tiny pieces in such an achingly wonderful way. It is a harsh look at life, power, corruption, consequence, and the surprising diamonds found in the refuse. What a wonderful, emotional roller coaster. More. More! MORE!

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Title: Stands a Shadow
Series: Heart of the World #2
Author: Col Buchanan
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Flintlock Fantasy
Pages: 481
Format: Digital Edition

Synopsis:

The Empire of Mann begins it conquest of the show more Free Isles. The Empress goes along because she is pissed off about her son dying. The real ruler of Mann, an old magician, sends along a Mannian “Diplomat” (code for assassin) named Che to make sure the Empress never runs from battle or acts like a coward. He also sends along 2 other Diplomats to take care of the first Diplomat once his job is done.

The military leader of the Free Isles goes against all expectations and leads an army into the field to confront the Mannian host. Using even more unexpected tactics, his goal is to slay the Empress and stall the army until winter sets in. The Empress is killed by the Diplomat for trying to run from the fight and the Mannian army is divided as the general and a noble vie for control. The leader of the Free Isles succumbs to the pressures he's been under and has a heart attack.

Che realizes his life is over since he killed the Empress and begins a running fight with the other 2 Diplomats. He survives and hooks up with a girl from the Free Isles and is trying to start over. He accidentally reveals that he is from Mann and the girl turns him into the authorities.

Meanwhile, Ash, the Farlander from the previous book, is trying to assassinate the Empress himself. He finds out that Che is an ex-Roshun and has betrayed the Roshun and that they are destroyed. The book ends with Ash asking the surviving Roshun to fight the Empire of Mann while he goes on a quest to bring his dead apprentice back to life.

My Thoughts:

If you divide this book up into 100 parts,not even 1 part would be “magic”. It's definitely Flintlock fantasy, but the magic is so under utilized that I really hesitated to even call it “Fantasy”. It is also very bleak and borders on the Grimdark.

It was written well and at no point was I jarred out of the story. That being said, I also never wanted to “read more” if I had to stop for bedtime or something else.

However, I won't be continuing this series for the following reasons. The nobles of Mann regularly partake in orgies of sex and drugs and while nothing is graphic, there are enough objectionable things mentioned that I want nothing to do with it. “Magicless” fantasy doesn't do it for me. Bleak doesn't do it for me. In general, the whole world and all the characters just leave me feeling very blasé. Blase doesn't do it for me either, in case you were wondering. Add in the fact that it took me 3 years to even search out the sequel to Farlander and that tells me something too.

Now I just have to decide what to replace this series with on my kindle. I've got the Caverns & Creatures series by Robert Bevan or the Dead Enders trilogy by Mike Resnick. Decisions, decisions.


★★★☆☆ show less

Given that this is a debut novel, it is perhaps forgivable that I hadn't heard of Col Buchanan before I read this book. But I'm glad that I have now. Farlander is a fantastic novel, with an incredible storyline, and a completely unexpected twist that, well, was quite a surprise...

The story starts quickly, in media res, and while the pace varies for the situation, the book never seems rushed, and never too slow. Somehow Buchanan always manages to get it right, and always keeps the plot flow show more interesting.

Uniquely, in my reading experience, there was one particular scene that stood out in memory, where Buchanan wrote an explanation for the immoral behaviour of "the bad guys", and constantly questions the morality of "the good guys", although he does explain their reasons too. Despite this, there is still the classic good and evil characterisations, but here it seems a deeper, more realistic blur of morality and conscience.

As with any good author, Buchanan writes several characters well, and even characters that appear for only a page or two can appear quite rounded. But the best characters were the Rōshun. Every one of them (Including the apprentices and a not-really Rōshun called Che) were well-written and extremely enjoyable to read.

In fact, there were only two problems with the book that I encountered, and they are minor. The first is that there was one storyline, that of Bahn, the General's advisor, didn't seem to make a lot of difference to the story, although it was interesting. Given that this is just the first book in the series however, it will be interesting to see where this leads. The other problem was the use of the ō character in the word Rōshun, but that's mainly because it meant I had to figure out how to write it in notepad for this review.

In summary, this book was incredible. Buchanan has the potential to become a popular author, and I hope that the publisher, Tor Books, helps him achieve this. Farlander is now one of my favourite books, and I look forwards to the next with anticipation. show less

Not bad but it just somehow didn't satisfy. A world in strife with names that sound like this one and then names that don't and I just had moments where I wanted him to call a smeerp a rabbit or a rabbit a smeerp but be consistent and just do it. This is a bit of a pet peeve and tends to break my suspension of disbelief.

The world is being overrun by the Holy Empire of Mann, which appears to be a religion of excesses and believe in control. It's a story of a farlander called Ash and his show more apprentice called Nico and their quest to avenge someone who was killed by the Empire and how their lives are changed by this quest.

The Empire comes across as just too evil to work over many years, they just stopped short of moustache twirling.

It's not a bad read but it just plodded along in several people's shoes, it reminded me of Gemmell, Kurtz and Martin and it just made me want to revisit the first two. I have no real urge to read the sequel. show less