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...