Tower Lord

The Raven's Shadow books are first and foremost simply entertaining. Anthony Ryan has a strong and engaging voice that makes these books eminently readable. The key draw for me are the characters - they are all richly developed and fun and engaging to read. Whilst Vaelin is a bit of a super character, the others are all nicely flawed and limited. Even Vaelin, despite his apparent immense abilities, still finds himself frequently in the wrong place, so there is definitely a sense of risk carried through the book.

As I said in my Blood Song review, these books are not innovative or boundary breaking, but they are extremely well written. I would rather take a well written and enjoyable book over a truly innovative one. Hard to put down and a pleasure to read. I look forward to reading the final book in the trilogy!

I give up, after 100 pages. Not only is it nothing like Blood Song, but even if read as an independent book it still feels too slow, way too disjointed (I struggled to remember all the characters, as they don't seem any different, except Reva - and I really really hated Reva) and just never captivating my attention. Even the world building felt lacking, not just the story and characters. And, since I mentioned Reva, because of her POV it also had an YA tinge. I strongly dislike YA,so there's that. Since I could not deal with this one, I will obviously not read the sequel, which everybody says is even (much more) worse, even though I have already bought it. Oh, well...

Executive Summary: Another great entry in what's quickly become one of my favorite series. The change in format may frustrating fans of the first book however.Audio book: Stephen Brand is once again a great narrator that could stand to have his volume boosted. He does an excellent job with voices and inflections, but can be frustratingly quiet in places.Full ReviewHow do you follow up a debut novel that seems to be almost universally loved by those who have read it? By writing a book that may be even better in my opinion.My opinion may not be shared by everyone who loved [b:Blood Song 13569581 Blood Song (A Raven's Shadow, #1) Anthony Ryan https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1363126955s/13569581.jpg 19148922]. This is definitely a different book from that. Instead of a single narrative about Vaelin told in the form of a flashback, we are instead given three new point of view characters in addition to Vaelin and the interludes from the perspective of the chronicler.Two of the characters, Frentis and Lyrna will be instantly familiar from the first novel. The fourth, Riva, was probably my favorite. As a new character she probably got the most character development of the four. I think having two male POVs and two female ones gave the novel a good balance.I found Lyrna's story to start a bit slow, but I was quickly grabbed by the book as a whole and eventually sucked into her narrative as well. Much like [b:Blood Song 13569581 Blood Song (A Raven's Shadow, #1) Anthony Ryan https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1363126955s/13569581.jpg 19148922] this is one of those books that grabbed hold and didn't let go. I hated to put it down and loved to pick it back up.I'm glad for the format change as I think Mr. Ryan was able to tell a much larger story as a result. There were parts of the story where the various POV's overlapped, but there were also a lot of things that would have gone otherwise unmentioned if he stuck with just Vaelin's story.We are once again given some excellent action scenes, though probably fewer overall than the first. While the first book was more a hero's journey, this book is more epic fantasy with larger implications to the realm as a whole.We get answers to many of the big questions I had from the first novel too. Often times it seems like authors jealously guard all their book's secrets and wait until the last possible minute to reveal them. Not so with this series. I felt there were several big reveals in parts 2 and 3 that other authors might have held back.There is plenty of new questions to take the place of those that are answered that kept me wanting to keep listening and find out what would happen next.Mr. Ryan has put himself in a precarious position of writing two really excellent novels in what I believe is supposed to be a trilogy. Now the expectations are that much higher for the finale of what has quickly become one of my favorite series.If you haven't read this book yet, do yourself a favor and pick it up. And if you haven't read/heard of this series you should check out [b:Blood Song 13569581 Blood Song (A Raven's Shadow, #1) Anthony Ryan https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1363126955s/13569581.jpg 19148922] as soon as you can.