I was given a free ebook copy in exchange for an honest review so here goes:



Exile opens with two brothers, Barde and Loster, sons of a local lord, in a forest, where they find an entrance to an altar in a mountain. There they encounter a huge, armored creature, who kills Barde, and Loster manages to escape.



From there the story continues three years later, following multiple POV characters, detailing their conflicts and journeys.



The story is really set up into two parts: For the first half,

I was given a free ebook copy in exchange for an honest review so here goes:



Exile opens with two brothers, Barde and Loster, sons of a local lord, in a forest, where they find an entrance to an altar in a mountain. There they encounter a huge, armored creature, who kills Barde, and Loster manages to escape.



From there the story continues three years later, following multiple POV characters, detailing their conflicts and journeys.



The story is really set up into two parts: For the first half, all the characters are sedentary, pretty much, and by the second half they are all traveling. The conflict is between the human characters and the supernatural forces destroying the cities and killing humans, such as doppelgangers and many armored creatures like the one from three years ago in the story. But anyway, the actual events of the novel I didn't find all that enjoyable, and it was very slow to get going. I liked the first few chapters the best. There was a lot of fighting in the story, which I hated reading through, so I just skimmed through those sections, and not a lot of enjoyable non-battle events. It wasn't particularly gripping. It was very easy for me to stop reading and start doing something else. There were some parts I wanted to know what happened next, but overall, it didn't inspire much curiosity. It took me over a month to finish this 326-page novel (which is no big deal for me to read, usually), which shows just how interested in it I was.



The actual prose and writing style of the novel wasn't bad at all. I thought a few lines corny but for the most part, the dialogue was believable, and descriptions and such well-written.



We have four main characters: Loster is a literal good-for-nothing. He's a wimp and everyone knows it. Beccorban is a legendary warrior, now 60 years old and everyone thinks he's dead. Riella--I don't know what she was supposed to be, a former prostitute and now fighter, and Callistan, a famous army officer, whose life is ruined at the hands of the doppelgangers. The characters clearly have their own histories, and personalities, (and I appreciated this effort on the author's part), with the exception of Callistan. He doesn't have a personality, other than wants revenge for what was done to him and is gloomy. And I think Loster would frustrate some people with his lame personality ( him killing in the final fight and experiencing "the thrill of battle" was like a joke. He can't do anything!). Beccorban and Riella are cool, though, I don't have any issues with them.



For the worldbuilding: The continent of Daegermund (love that name) has a history as well. The novel mentions many times events taken place in the cities, and famous people from the past wars and so on. Though! It's a pretty boring place, despite all that. Nowhere in the novel did it say that a particular city had soaring towers, with bricks shining gold in sunlight, or if there were caves with glowing crystals in them, or giant colourful butterflies living in a field-- nothing that captured the imagination or anything remotely interesting! I thought when I was done, "What's the point in fighting for such a boring continent, anyway?" There's not much to say about the world of the story except that it was just dull. To do with magic: just the enemies are supernatural, and Loster can hear a voice in his head, talking to him, so there's that for the magic part, but otherwise, no magic humans use in their daily lives or anything like that.



My overall impression wasn't that the novel was groundbreaking, or awesome, or it had anything special in it, just okay. There was nothing in it I haven't read about before. I am not really interested in reading this book's sequel. This one ended with the humans marching to fight more monsters and take back their country, so I just know the next book will be riddled with boring battles, and that I don't want to read about at all. The enemies in the book wore armor and they did seem pretty tough, but with some battles they were dispatched quickly. :/ I can kinda see how the next book will go...



So to finalize:



Re-readability: Low

Priority: Low

I recommend this book for: Someone who is interested in reading a story about a war legend's new adventures in the making.

My thoughts: Nothing groundbreaking, despite the premise, which I thought interesting, but didn't deliver much enjoyable content.



















