The Grace of Kings

After reading the last few chapters, I was reminded of all the old anecdotes, stories we(the children of the 70's) had to brave (We had to study this again and again, from our primary schooling until our secondary, the product of two cultures, you had to study Filipino/English, and in the afternoon Chinese)through, This hero did that, this hero followed this greater hero, and was backstabbed, and so forth and so on, perhaps the best story to compare this to was The Three Kingdoms, Kuni Garu as Liu Bei, Mata Zyndu as Cao Cao, and Gin Mazoti as the genius strategist Sun Quan.

What made it different was the introduction of Gods which added some spice(only some, since there was no magic system), some ideas that could have made China into a powerful nation(I mean mechanical crubens or steel boats/submarines), kites and dirigibles.

Aside from that, this novel gave me the impression of a Westernized version of those old books we studied, the heroics, the double crossing, was it better, ummmm I would say not that much, I would have preferred more mystical abilities, this was man at his best and brutal at the same time. I am having second thoughts on finishing the series but as per my principle, once I start a series, I try to finish it, whether a trilogy, quadrology, quintology and so forth.

Executive Summary: I enjoyed parts of this book a lot, but overall found it a bit to uneven and slow in places. It's another one that suffers from lack of half star ratings. It's a solid 3.5 star book, that I initially gave 4 stars, but on collecting my thoughts for this review decided to round down to 3 stars instead.

Audio book: Finding out Michael Kramer did the audio from this made it go from wait for a library copy to buy it on audio. I was initially underwhelmed. It's probably not his best performance.

But even a so-so Michael Kramer reading is leaps and bounds above many narrators out there. This became even more obvious when I started my next book. I immediately missed his reading. You really can't go wrong with the audio though. I definitely wouldn't have finished this book so quickly if I was reading it.

Full Review
This book starts slow, but I enjoyed meeting some of the characters and the world building. Far too many fantasy worlds are based on medieval Europe. So it's nice to have one based on Asia instead.

I think the best aspect of this book for me was the gods as characters. This isn't the first fantasy series to do this, but it meshed in well and added an interesting element to the overall story.

Things built up slowly and then finally became interesting, but then seemed to slow way down again. Then it got interesting again before slowing down as things were sort of wrapped up in the final section. This made the pacing pretty uneven to me. The fight scenes and the actual rebellion didn't do much for me. And that's a large part of this book.

What I did enjoy was the actual plotting and administration of government. I appreciated the contrast between Kuni, Mata and the various Kings/Emperors. In some ways it was a bit too optimistic. Kuni is far from a perfect person, but seems incredibly proficient as a leader. Meanwhile Mata is entirely too stupid. Some of the characters actions just didn't make a lot of sense to me.

The other main issue I had was the female characters. This book had some really great ones. Jia, Soto and another I'll refrain from naming. However it felt like it took him far too long to include them as more than just minor characters in the book. I felt Jia was especially underused. I would have liked more time and involvement from them.

For much of the book it seems to be yet another fantasy world where women are relegated to the side lines/dismissed by most male characters. I get that's often how things have worked in our history, but does that mean it needs to be the case in EVERY fantasy series too? I'm hopeful that will be less of the case in future books though.

Overall there is enough here for me to want to check out the next book, but I found myself a bit underwhelmed after all the early buzz.