The Curse of Chalion

This was an unexpected book for me! When I read the book description, I confess I was not so excited about it.

However, I was not disappointed! It is a very elegantly written tale, and the world building is amazing! I thought it had a slow start at the beginning. At 30% of the book I was feeling nothing was going to happen, the pace was slower than I would have enjoyed. The main character, Cazaril, is presented as a broken man, escaped from slavery, and returned to his Kingdom (Royacy) searching for shelter. At these introductory chapters, I wrongly suspected there would be no magic or fantastic events in the story.

The author slowly builds the characters and unravels the magical and religious background of the kindgdom of Chalion. After it is clear that there is a dark curse going on and that Cazaril is the ???hero??? who takes action to solve the mystery (and gets deeply involved with it), the pace of the book increases greatly. From this point forward, I could not let the book down. I ended up loving Cazaril???s integrity, objectivity and sarcastic observations, and could not help but keep my fingers crossed for him. I really enjoyed the writing style of the book. It is classy but not over the top. The dialogues are great too, and the characters feel real and authentic.

All I can say without being ???spoilery??? is that it was a very pleasant read and I loved the ending, even though it may sound foreseeable for some. It is a great fantasy novel, very well balanced and with the right amount of magic in it.

I'll probably read the sequel ???Paladin of Souls???.