Stone and Flesh

Promising start, but drags in the middle and doesn't quite have enough cohesion at the end, something about the balance of the plot didn't work well with me. It wasn't quite clear what was happening, and despite reaching the end I'm still not entirely sure how the world works or why everyone was so concerned about the stones.

I do generally like epic fantasy, and although it's a bold genre choice for a debuet novel, it mostly worked well. The characters choice was kept down to reasonable numbers (even if a couple had too similar names). There'd been a war - never really sure about what. And then a plague. And now some dozen years later life is getting back to normal, ish, with a lot of losses. In a temple a Shepard (of the soul) helps show more spirits of the recently dead be released back to the magical source. This latest spirit of a famous soldier, tells him where something is hidden which turns out to be these seeds/stones that apparently triggered the war. Only they don't seem to do anything. The Shephard hooks up with some friends which is lucky because suddenly lots of people are hunting him, and he only knows about souls. The friends go to meet other friends who have also been attacked, and eventually they reach some temporary manner of safety and have to decide what to do next.

Which was all fine - the non-humans aren't exactly typical and there's a few other beasts around again with unusual abilities, but it mostly made sense. Unlike the magic which was both allowed and suspect. I think mostly knowing more about the war might have helped make sense of the rest of it. Especially the demon which wasn't necessary to the plot.

May read the rest if they're ever written to understand what it was about. show less