The Shadow of What Was Lost

There were some bright spots. The last 10% was pretty exciting, with some actual surprising reveals.

Most of it felt like a bit of a slog for me, mostly because:

(1) it had way more of a YA tone than i expected. I naiively thought from other reviews that it was a more grown-up fantasy story. YA can mean a lot of things besides the characters being YA's... for me it meant there was constant explicit disclosure of what everyone was feeling and thinking all the time. There was no subtext. Like the author's expectation that the reader could understand anything themselves was extremely low and had to be told “he felt worried”, “he felt X”, “she felt Y”. And some very dumb adolescent boy descriptions of the female characters. Like disney-princess-level stuff. And a lot of very basic moralizing like, “he was his friend... of COURSE he could trust him.” That kind of adolescent view of the world typical of YA writing.

(2) magic system was fairly annoying to read about. Lots of magic and blasting things, which is fine. After awhile i found the constant reveals of new things the magic-users could do, could not do, “in this situation i can do this, but not that”, and there was absolutely no reason why they would know most it. They just told you it was this way. Throughout the entire book reveals of what this magic could do or not do were happening, so i always felt like, well, there's no way for me as a reader to know if this thing that happened makes sense or not, because some new rule about how the magic works would just be arbitrarily proffered.

Tell me if it gets way better in the second book. Otherwise i'll try a different series.