ILLBORN

I try not to give 5/5 because in my eyes it should be reserved for the very best..and this is definitely one of them.

A medieval setting, following four 18 year olds from very different backgrounds, who start to develop powers. Powers that are forbidden and hunted. Only a dream that they all share connects the four. They must unite or else succumb to the will of whoever is hunting them.

All four characters have a distinct voice, each having their own thoughts and moral compass that is completely different from the rest. My favourite has the be Corin, they all go through a lot in this book, however I do feel the best connection between him and I love his companion..I can't say anymore!
They all, or most of them, have moments where you may disagree with them, which I love because we are all humans, we all make decisions differently.

The story telling is great, this is one of those books where you can't put it down, and you will be thinking about the characters while doing you whatever chores you have. The world is very believable, you certainly feel as though you can see the world through each character's eyes.

The brutal world that Jackson has crafted is beautiful and scary. The characters are some of the best I've read over the last few years. I cannot wait for the sequel to find out what happens next. Congratulations to the author for this brilliant piece of work!

5/5 stars, of course. You can find me at Twitter - @readsgavin

Okay so apparently Twitter is under the assumption this was in bad faith. I can understand thinking that due to the timing. However, I merely thought this book was just not good. Sorry for the pedestrian reason for giving something one star. I think it goes without saying that people shouldn't harass authors or, really, anybody, for their relatively mild actions. Also giving something a poor rating you havent read is stupid.

HOWEVER.

I originally read this book over a year ago and really did not like it. I try not to blast self-pub books that I don't like and it was earlier in my reviewing time where I was worried about the balance between constructive criticism and not, so I just elected to keep my thoughts to myself. Added to that, the author seemed like a friendly guy, and I had no desire to trash his book. In light of recent events, I just decided that if he didn't seem to respect the reviewer space in general, I would post my actual rating of the book. Seems fair. This was straightforward to me. I repeat: don't harass authors off of social media platforms. Also probably don't act petty when you get negative reviews. Probably there's a middle ground here somewhere.

Anyway I disliked this book for a lot of reasons. I thought the sentences were extremely awkward on almost every page. Word choices that didn't make a lot of sense and stilted dialogue. The worst example was when a father said “the fuck you will” to his son wanting to become a priest or something. It was just such an awkward, modern millenial-sounding thing to be saying in a medieval fantasy book. In general, I thought most of the dialogue was very average. Also it's important for context that I am not a prose snob, there are a lot of what I would describe as pedestrian writing styles that work perfectly fine for me. But the flow of this one felt very off for me personally.

I also thought the female characters were bad. This has been mentioned in other reviews, and I agree with them. One character has magical lust powers that she uses to rape men and it's not handled maturely enough, IMO, to not feel incredibly gross and weird. I think rightfully so if a male character had this power and plotline it would go very poorly. Then the other two female characters are just the nice girl who has never done anything wrong and then there's a disabled girl who exists just to love and support this barbarian guy. So generally this wasn't great.

But the other big issue I had was just that people kept saying this book was super unique and I do not understand where the unique parts come into play. There are chosen ones, there is Christianity but with a different name, it is medieval. There is tribal warfare. So I felt confused on why it was sold to me this way. Uniqueness is not a prerequisite for goodness; but the other aspects of the story weren't particularly interesting either. The characters all fell into archetypes and the worldbuilding was very basic; there are tribes warring, why? There's a religious organization that believes...what? There was just nothing exciting going on.

And I really tried. I DNF'd the book at 25% but I was determined to like it and came back and read until 50% mark and just felt utter despair the whole time. I did not like a single aspect of the book besides the prologue, which was excellent.

Anyway to sum up, this review is genuine, Twitter is a bad place, and magical lust storylines are weird. Thanks for attending my TED talk.

Absolutely phenomenal. I love character driven stories and this is top tier for me and probably the best self published book I've read and by far the best Prologue ever written of any book ever. I promise!

Another thing I like is animal supporting characters. John Gwynne and Robin Hobb do a great job of this and now I can include Daniel Jackson in that category. Blackpaw is basically a Werewolf, I refuse to accept any other word for this bad ass creature companion of my favorite character in the story, Corin.

Every character has a power that mostly revolve around mind control. Corin has the ability to effect your motor skills and he can also see what you see. He's a 5'3” dweeb, but as most fantasy stories go, he is much more important than you think

Arion has the ability to make your movements slow which makes him a warrior to be reckoned with. He also seems to be in love at first sight with both the female main cast so this might get juicy in the sequel.

Leanna is a highly devoted religious fanatic and also has the ability to heal mortal wounds. Although she has to do it secretly because unexplained phenomena is considered a heretic act and she will be burned alive.

Alana is a very decisive for the most annoying of reasons. She is very beautiful and is the daughter of a prostitute. She vows to live a better life, yet starting in chapter 2 of her story she finds she has the ability to get people to do what she wants by messing with their head to get them to have sex with her. It's a bit ridiculous and uncomfortable because the entire story is her basically raping men to fall under their protection. But people are being very dramatic and saying this is sexist because you wouldn't write a male character this way. I agree that it would definitely be more weird to have a man raping women, but to call it sexist is ridiculous. By that standard it would be sexist to have men on the cover of romance books with their shirt off because “you wouldn't have a naked female on the cover”. Everyone needs to quit being lame and just enjoy the book and ignore the minor parts you don't like, or just don't read it and quit being an ass to the people who enjoyed it.

I've also found out that the author supposedly is blocking people who give 1 star reviews. That is next level petty and definitely serious narcissism but this is a review of the book not the author. Although I don't see how anyone in the world could give this 1 star anyway.

If you can overlook the 2 negative qualities of the book/author then give this amazing book a shot!