The Hidden Face is a novel that I really wanted to love but just had some issues that kept me from really getting into the very good storyline. This is a novel that in many ways was a mystery thriller novel set in a fantasy world. Our two main protagonists are Dayraven and Sunniva, two very distinctive names for sure.

Dayraven is a 30 year old man whose father was a great hero who died because of treachery. When he was a teenager he was sent in a hostage exchange between his empire, Faustia, and

The Hidden Face is a novel that I really wanted to love but just had some issues that kept me from really getting into the very good storyline. This is a novel that in many ways was a mystery thriller novel set in a fantasy world. Our two main protagonists are Dayraven and Sunniva, two very distinctive names for sure.

Dayraven is a 30 year old man whose father was a great hero who died because of treachery. When he was a teenager he was sent in a hostage exchange between his empire, Faustia, and the Duke of Magia, to ensure peace between the two. He is very intelligent and is much like his father. When the story begins he is understandably upset that he has been left for 15 years and worries that he no longer truly fits in after spending his formative years in Magia. He was given a first rate education and training while he was a hostage and has grown to love the Duke.

When we first meet Sunniva she is dressed as a soldier in disguise. This is not a world where women are equal and allowed to serve as soldiers so she has stolen some of her brother’s gear in order to fit in. Sunniva is beautiful and smart and as we get to know her a little better we see she has been well educated by her father, who was friends with Dayraven’s tutor, and Sunniva’s father and Dayraven’s tutor appear to have set them up to solve an important mystery that may be tied to the religion of this world.

The religion of this world is actually pretty cool and is a nice touch in helping to flesh out the world and directly helps set up the political situation in the world. Akhen, their god, has appeared in the guise of different people four different times in the history of the world during the last two thousand years. The Face gives a different country access to blessings and technology that allows them to gain power over other countries and they are able to build an empire. The Face seems to disappear fairly shortly after they appear but their blessing remains for roughly five hundred years each time. Faustia was blessed by the Face close to six hundred years ago so many people are just waiting to see how much longer they will remain a dominant power. As the story begins they are actually growing in power but many people worry that they should actually be working to improve relations with their neighbors in case one of those neighbors receives the blessing next.

I think that the story itself is very compelling and I enjoyed the way the puzzle solving scenes were written. Some of the characters were very well written and I genuinely cared what happened to them. I think that the storytelling is the strongest element of the novel.

I didn’t always care for the very frequent flashbacks in the novel but they serve to do the bulk of the world building in the novel.

The reason that this is a 3* instead of a 4 or 5* novel for me though is that there were a lot of little things that at times took me out of the flow of the story, that “movie in my mind” I drone on about endlessly.

First of all the author uses the character’s very distinctive names even when saying “he” or “she” would suffice. This isn’t a big deal but at one point the author even has the emperor speaking to Dayraven and say, “Right now, you remind me of your father, Urland.” Now this isn’t a big deal, and I understand that the author does this to help the reader learn a name, but unless Dayraven has two fathers it wasn’t necessary for his name to be included in that sentence. Things like that take me out of the flow of the story as I am imagining the emperor in a scene that the author actually set up amazingly well. The author described the scene well enough that I was really imagining I was watching the emperor talking to Dayraven but that’s not something that he would ever have had to say to Dayraven. There are quite a few instances of characters say8ing things that are obviously meant to help the reader but that make the dialogue feel clunky at times.

I felt like the antagonists in the story weren’t as well written as the protagonists. Astolf can seem like a caricature of a villain at times with his bumbling and poorly thought out, fear based decisions. He has managed to rise to a very high position within the church and is supposed to be the emperor’s most trusted advisor but even if some treachery is involved I never believed that he would have been capable of rising to this position of power even with help.

Death, the Rider was another character who I didn’t particularly think was written like a real person. He seemed too much like a simpleton to me.

This novel had quite the mystery thriller element to it and at times I did feel like certain things were explained to me a little too well. I would have liked to feel that mystery along with the characters and to have had the characters keep a little bit of what they were thinking, or had found out, to themselves.

One last thing is that at times as I was reading this book I would go twenty pages completely locked in and really enjoying the book when I would hit a section that almost made me think it had been written at a much earlier time and when the book was re-written at a later date was a scene that got left in. I have no idea if this is actually the case but the way I felt that it could be uneven gave me that impression.

So at the end I would say that there are many people who would enjoy this novel for the storyline and if you aren’t quite as anal about little details like feeling like a sentence of dialogue was written just for the reader and wouldn’t have been necessary strictly if the two characters had been speaking to each other. Unfortunately things like that do bother me and when I am taken out of the flow of the book to think about things like that I have trouble truly enjoying a book.

