Dawn of Wonder

This is a book that I'd been looking forward to reading quite a long time. It's been recommended to me on Audible for about a hundred times, and it interested me a lot based on its description. However, I can't help but feel disappointed now that I've finished it.

I find it very hard to put it into words exactly what was missing for me, but I lacked a connection to the story. It slowed down in pace often enough, and there were chapters that I felt were not needed, and I could live with that, but it was hard to really grasp the story at times. We have a main plot, that is heavily touched upon at the start of the book, and only resurfaces for a bit at the end, but in the meantime we also have (magical?) beasts on the loose in a forest and some high-powered people in the city aren't all what they seem, but neither of those two had a real effect on the story or particularly high stakes. The beasts felt random, and the political intrigue felt almost like a story filler until we got to the actual thing, which will likely be most of the next book. Since they're leaving the city, are we even going to see much of it in the next one?

When it comes to characters, there are quite a few. Aedan is our main character, and he's alright, but again I was missing that connection. Osric is the true MVP though, and I liked Lorrimer as well, but that's about it.

The parts of the story I did find interesting though, was the whole beginning in Mistyvales with just a bunch of kids having adventures and having fun, as well as the school parts with the lessons and the exams and the students helping eachother out. That's definitely when I was most into it, but I felt otherwise it spun a bit out of control and wanting to be too many things at once. Which is why it's three stars, because overall I liked it, but I'm just a bit down on it because I felt that it could have been much more (or at least much less, like just if the story was trimmed down, or just with a focus shift).