The Pariah

DNF at 54%. Generally, I am not a big fan of the main character telling his own story. Why? Because it almost feels like we are waiting to get to the cool part. I know he is not going to rot in a prison forever. There must be something much cooler waiting for him if he was meant to have his story told, right? There has to be a point. A good 300+ pages in, the point is still not revealed. The fact that this one has a single POV doesn't help with the feeling that I am wasting my time. Being realistic here, hardly any story where every moment is super exciting. I am not going to blame an author for that, real life isn't exciting every day either. But this one... Alvyn is just waiting to escape from every situation so far. It all feels like filler content, the bridge to the cool things. But how many hundreds of pages do I have to read to get at least a little payoff? The talk about martyrs and religion and impending cosmic doom tells me there is big stuff. Big enemies, monumental conflicts. Yet we are fucking around with Alwyn doing meaningless things with a lot of descriptions. What was the use of describing some totally meaningless priest character?? Who cares? Especially because honestly, all of the characters die without any meaningful bond or a way for us to develop empathy for them. Even when they are Alwyn's friends, we never see any of that. We are told that “X character is stuck in this boring situation with Alwyn and they want to escape”. Never seen sharing a good moment. Just being told they were stuck in the same shitty place for years. Because so far, this book is “Escape: The Novel”. They do nothing, but wait around to escape a shitty situation. Just to do the same in another crappy, boring place. I have had my issues with the prison part of [b:The Ember Blade 34673711 The Ember Blade (The Darkwater Legacy, #1) Chris Wooding https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1490348335l/34673711.SY75.jpg 55844744], but at least we got the best character there. But here, we got what? Toria? Who literally never does anything, just mopes? Sometimes the characters have plot armour and that makes things weightless. But here, it's the exact opposite. I know nobody of these characters will actually last, because hey, none of them do. We will just wipe the whole thing, I will have to remember 10 new people, who will also get wiped. Without any consequences. Can anyone tell me why Alwyn needed multiple religious criminal characters in his life? Did we need them to be different people? Did it make a difference? No. Not even a little. So really, just read Draconis Memoria by the same author, that one was fun. This? Boring. Slow.

As my first book by Anthony Ryan, I never know what to expect and if I'm going to jive with their writing style. But I am pleased to say we jive very well. He finds a balance between grim, brutal battles, and sly humour. Much like his main character, I found myself grinning a lot through this book. It's a bit of a slow burn, but has fantastic pay offs. As someone who's halfway through the second book in this trilogy, I can look back and see just how much The Pariah sets the stage. So if you like stories with underdog's, gruesome battles, political intrigue and a smart ass hero (anti-hero?), then this is your jam.

I started reading in the library while the kids were doing a crafting thing, and 55 pages in I knew that I had to take the book out and finish it. Halfway in and it's even better.

Finished. Can't wait to read the next one - an absolute blast (and I love the way Ryan has taken real events and people from history and myth and mixed them together into a kind of fantasy stew).

I received an ARC for this in June. It took me an extremely long time to read and I ended up buying it on audio as a deal and finishing it that way. My biggest problem with it is that you absolutely should NOT read the summary of the book. Everything that is mentioned in the summary doesn't happen until 45% through the book and it just crushes momentum. I've seen other reviews say the same thing, so it's definitely not just me that was affected by this. It felt like the entire first 20% felt like it could have been reduced to a prologue or just been done through exposition.

I kept waiting for the actual story to begin. Even after the 45% mark, I never felt like the MC takes an active role in his own story. It's just things that happen to him. The battle/fight scenes were well done, but mostly this book just failed to make any impact on me. I'm reading Bloodsong next month and I'm pretty hopeful that it will be better! 5/10

The Pariah by Anthony Ryan is the first in his bibliography that I've read, and I have to say, what a first impression it was. The TL:DR of this review is that it absolutely blew me away despite a rocky start, and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who is fond of Grim Dark, because to date, this is one of the best I've read yet.

It follows Alwyn Scribe, a figure of note in the kingdom of Albermaine, who is telling us the tale of how he became this figure of note. Throughout the book, great deeds and stories of him and his companions are hinted at, but we don't see any of the major ones in this book.

This book serves primarily as setup for the future installments in the trilogy (albeit a very good setup), essentially acting as the trilogy's prologue. This is a method of storytelling some author's try, but rarely manage to make work in any meaningful way, as this style of first entry can end up being rather boring, lacking any meaningful form of conclusion to character arcs.

Ryan managed to setup and deliver on multiple satisfying story arcs throughout the book, while still dangling enough threads in front of me to entice me back for the entire trilogy. At this point, I've gone ahead and ordered my copy of the Martyr, and pre-ordered my copy of the Traitor for when it releases.

The world that Ryan built consistently had me wanting to know more, and getting frustrated at Alwyn's lack of knowledge on the world around him, because it always felt like there was some bit of information just outside of his knowledgebase, which added so much to my experience with the book.

And if the world was good, the characters were masterful. Every single character felt realized to their full potential, none of them boiled down to good and bad, they just were, and it was fantastic. Characters would be coloured as either good or bad based on Alwyn's world view, yes, but by the time the story was done, they were usually much more complicated than it would initially seem. There is one exception to this, however it would be spoilers for me to get into it.

There are 3 characters I want to highlight, as I think they're deserving of extremely high praise.

The first is Wilhum. Without going too deep into spoilers, Wilhum's character arc, and delving into his reasoning behind joining the pretender was excellently done, and when his devotion to his god was explained, it made me bawl my eyes out, the only event to do so in this novel.

The second has to be Evadine. Evadine feels like a character that has been heavily inspired by multiple historical figures, such as Joan of Arc, Martin Luther (the protestant, not the King), and, oddly enough, Jesus. Usually, a character being this heavily inspired by Jesus would make me not all that fond of them, but again, Ryan just has this very clean way of sequestering his characters within the pages in a believable way that doesn't feel inauthentic to the story he tells.

Lastly is by far and away my favourite character, and that's Alwyn. Alwyn is one of the most enjoyable protagonists that I've seen in a while. I adore how he was written as this man who was so complicated, not even he could parse the maze of his own goals. This led to an ungodly well thought out character arc, that will subtly sneak up on you, and again, is just utterly believable.

His worldview is never changed drastically, instead he just finds the ability to understand how he truly views the world, instead of simply latching onto the beliefs of others that don't clash with his own enough to cause issue with him. This lets him, and by extension the reader, begin to see the world from perspectives that were locked off to him either through ignorance, or just through fooling himself.

Watching Alwyn grow in faith was absolutely fascinating to watch, as was his deep loyalty to the people he aligned himself with. If he continues to grow like this in future installments, he might end up as one of my favourite protagonists in modern fantasy.

The prose in this book is also something worth praising. It's generally quite easy to read, and won't challenge you with it's wording, but it does have a tendency to just come out of left field with an absolute banger of a quote. This is evidenced by Ryan opening the book with one.

“Before killing a man, I always found it calming to regard the trees.”

What a way to start a book. It's not going to go down as one of the great openers of fantasy, but that line just sticks with me as such a solid tone setter.

All this glowing praise is to say, I think you should read this book. It truly is a phenomenal time. There are some caveats, and outright cons in that, and I'm going to expand on them as I go on, but I just wanted to make it clear that I love this book. But it has some problems that are going to end up rubbing people the wrong way.

So, I'll start off with a light one. There's no blurb on the back of the UK Mass Market Paperback. This might not sound like much of an issue, but in my opinion it's a big deal. You should still read this book, but my god, does it seem like Orbit didn't want you to. Instead, they just have a quote from the book, and then multiple recommendations from other authors. But all you have to go off of is a quote, that, to be honest, can very easily mislead people into thinking this is a book about an Assassin.

This isn't an issue that solely exists for this book, Shadow of the Gods is another book that Orbit have decided doesn't deserve a blurb. However, that book has the benefit of releasing with one of the most striking covers in the last ten years. The Pariah has very generic art on the cover. It's a hooded man with a sword. It's very well made and was obviously painstakingly designed to get the tone of the book across, but it doesn't do as good a job of conveying the series as the next two books in the trilogy's covers do. This cover also doubles down on the issue that the quote at the back creates. Again, this is a very small gripe, and I've spent more time than it's worth on it, but it really made it difficult to want to continue at first, especially when combined with the next issue.

The plot takes a very long time to get traction. For me, it took about 100 pages before I got into the story for the story, since up to that point, the quality of Alwyn's voice was the thing that kept me going. The blurb that Goodreads has, or even a shortened version, would have had me in the gate from the word go. It's important to note however, I have seen some reviews of this say that they didn't get into the book until almost halfway through. The events in the blurb don't take place until after the midpoint of the book.

This can lead to the story not really feeling like it has much thrust in it for a good portion of it, which is a massive problem, that again, is only really saved by Alwyn's voice. I'm generally a character reader, as opposed to a plot reader, so this wasn't the worlds biggest turnoff for me, but I can 100% see people wanting to drop the book as they get halfway through the book and still don't even see a goal in sight.

However, all that being said, this book is stellar, and if you can get past these issues, I cannot recommend it enough.

I rate the book a 4.5/5, the only reason it's not a 5 is because of the difficulty I had in maintaining interest with the opening. Other than that, I find very little within the text to actually hold up as an issue.

This book was freaking dope. It had a Game of Thrones / Robin Hood feel to it for me.

You have Alwyn, a very intelligent teenager bandit. Everyone important in his life seems to like him and hone in his skills to be more skilled in everything he does.

After an act of betrayal he seeks revenge and allies himself with people as he sees fit.

There is a war between the King and the Pretender King and people must choose sides.

The author writes great female characters as well as Alwyn. The other characters are meh. There is a battle scene that is probably my favorite battle scene of all time!! He ties up everything nicely and doesn't end on a big cliffhanger so thats a nice change of pace.

This book is highly religious so you might dislike that but it doesn't bother me any. It's also a pretty dark book but no more than Joe Abercrombie. A bit slow going but ramps up nicely. I highly recommend

Favorite books this year so far:
1. Empire of the Damned by Jay Kristoff
2. The Pariah by Anthony Ryan
3. The Dragons of Deepwood Fen by Bradley Beaulieu
4. Disquiet Gods by Christopher Ruocchio
5. The King Killing Queen by Shawn Speakman

Incredible read! The story through the narrator's voice who you are unsure what is the narrator's fate or in what setting you are hearing the story is quite refreshing. The grimdark nature of the book is aligned nicely with the story. It seems like a world where if these events were to happen then of course some of these actions would happen. The writing is developed in such a way as to immerse you in the story.

Reading this book and books like it has firmly put me on the road to retire early and just read for the next 10 years.