The Thousand Names by
Django Wexler
My rating:
3 of 5 stars
I don't know. In the end, I honestly can't say I liked it very much.
I think part of it was the pacing. Everything happened so fast and yet so very slowly. It never dragged, exactly, but it felt off.
The characters were a bit odd too. I really wanted to love Janus, but I just couldn't. He wasn't consistent enough to be awesome.
I honestly wish it had been historical fiction. The magic felt like an effort to draw the plot out. And I'm thoroughly sick of guns in fantasy novels (Mistborn and Brian McClellan used up my tolerance, so it's not really this book's fault).
The wars went too smoothly. Sure, people die... but no one we really care about. And the more absurdly complex the plan, the more it works perfectly. Winter, for example, is for some reason constantly getting trapped and having to think up a brilliant escape plan. I couldn't help thinking her leadership skills would have been better directed at not getting her entire company trapped in the first place. And if she's just a random soldier, are all the other officers doing the same thing? Because if this is random chance, entire companies should be getting wiped out ever few days.
The lack of real female characters was unfortunate. Understandable, except that the attempt was made and then not carried through (one character who's revealed to be female then proceeds to pretty much turn from a brave soldier into a damsel in distress for the rest of the book).
It had so much potential. It was so clearly a good book. I was eager to read it and finished it fairly quickly. I'll probably regret it, but I'm going to read the next one.
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All Fall Down by Ally Carter
