I wish I liked this book better. I love stories with dragons and magic, but this one fell flat for me. I'm willing to forgive the multiple typos and weird sentences because it was an advance copy and I can hope they'll be fixed (though there were more than I would have expected at this stage in the publishing process). But they did make reading it more of a struggle. It's hard to stay immersed in a book when characters are saying things that don't make sense or include really weird typos/artifacts of speech to text. But more than that, I found most of the characters unlikeable. The first chapter is from a character's point of view who I started to like. Then she was basically put into a magical coma and didn't show up again for 8 chapters. When she did show up again, she had no dialogue and very little action until near the end of the book. Then she was given one more short POV chapter and as far as you know at the end of the book, she may be dead. The character whose death sets off the plot seems to be a terrible person, but everyone in the book is devastated by his death. While the male main character seemed to be more devastated by the fact that now he had to take on the Overlord's duties, he didn't seem to have any sort of conflicted emotions about the fact that his abusive father was now dead. The female main character was better. I almost liked her. But her insistence on being included in missions that required mobility while suffering from an injury just made me show more roll my eyes. This girl was willing to cripple herself rather than let someone more capable handle the work. And it doesn't really make it much better just because she seemed to pull it all off. Some of the side characters were interesting, but for the first book in a series, there was a LOT of death. Almost everyone cool was killed off, and hardly any of them got cool or heroic deaths. And on top of all that, I really really did not like the scenes from the villain's POV. He was not a complicated villain. He was not morally gray. He enjoyed torturing people for fun. So no thanks, i don't want to be privy to his thoughts.

There were a lot of seeds of cool things in this book. The world was very reminiscent of Terry Brooks' Shannara, a fantasy world with magic layered over a post-cataclysmic tech world. Ruins of automobiles and skyscrapers mixed with dragons was kind of cool. I never quite understood what the Hallowed Hall was that they kept referencing, but perhaps that was left purposely vague for some plot point in a future book. I don't know if the book was purposely anti-monotheistic, or if that's just the world he created. But the "good guys" follow multiple gods and the villain follows a One True God. So as a Christian, I wasn't much of a fan of that tone, but that is more about me than the novel, so that's not going to bother everyone.

If you like dragons and magic, and you're maybe a fan of Terry Brooks' Shannara books, you might like this. I didn't. But I saw decent bones in there. So someone who is less annoyed by a smart and strong woman making stupid decisions might love this. Someone less bothered by scenes from the villain's POV might love this. Someone less bothered by a child being wholly devastated by the loss of an abusive parent might love this. Someone less bothered by the Kill Your Gays trope and Fridging, might love this. It just seemed to contain all the little things that annoy me. show less