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. ( )