C. A. Oliver

Full disclosure, I haven't read the Songs of the Islands series, but the description of the book sounded very interesting and I love high fantasy, so I figured I'd go with it. The story centers around Eneos, an elf who is a direct descendent of four bladesmiths. Being the only one in existence, he features prominently in a great war that is going down between the four cities of elves who live in the valley (different groups of elves who pull together to fight the good fight) and the dark elves, who want to take over the valley and enslave everybody.

I liked the premise, but the execution was a bit weighed down by information dumping. I felt like the first half of the book was just facts with no real story. There was just so much information to take in that it was hard not to get confused. Thankfully, the story picked up in the second half of the book, and I really started enjoying it. I think if the whole book had balanced facts and world building with action and plot, it would have been a much more interesting read. I think you might need to read the series before this prequel to understand it better.

I'm giving this book 3.5/5 stars because I think it has promise.

I received a copy of this book free of charge from NetGalley in exchange for my honest opinion.… (meer)

An Act of Faith is an epic fantasy novel, the first in a planned twelve-book series. A group of elves sail across the Austral Sea to find islands where others of their types settled a long time before. They find many other elves though they aren't necessarily greeted with enthusiasm.
The book starts out in a promising manner. The sea voyage is exciting and there's a concise cast of diverse characters and backstory. However, I found the book to gradually slow. There are dozens of new characters introduced and so many new places that I frankly became confused, especially when sometimes characters use names and others their titles. The author was good enough to provide some endnotes, but because of the profusion of people names and place names, I would have liked a character list segmented by type of elve and relationships, as well as a map of the countries/places so I could identify the place names. *** My bad, I've found that the Annexes do include this extra information including maps, genealogies, elve branches, and more. I wish I'd seen that before I read the book, as it would have helped but ebooks don't always point this out well.
The writing is Tolkienesque, somewhat stilted, but I was fine with it for the most part. However, it really slowed things down by the time of the council as each character arose to speak for several pages. While I recognized some of the speakers, there were others who seem to have just appeared and I wasn't sure what their motivation was or why they were there. That may be due to my own confusion with tracking all the characters, but I found it hard to care what they were saying when I had no idea who they were.
This may be an interesting world but I suspect it looks better as a game like Elder Scrolls than in a book. I want to thank Netgalley for providing the book for an honest review.… (meer)