King’s Guard

So I enjoyed Book 1 of this series but had my issues with it. Constantly it felt like it was on the cusp of greatness but lacking that little bit extra to push it over the edge. Well, with Book 2 I can say that some of those points have been addressed, but at the same time this book again appears to just be missing that special something to earn it a hallowed place in my heart.

We re-join the story immediately following the events of Book 1, and a good thing to considering the abruptness of Book 1’s ending. We still have our three main storylines occurring in parallel, and all three progress with enough pacing to keep me hooked. Additionally though, we now have another couple of main characters thrown into the mix, and by the gods, most of them are women! The fact that the first book had so many character perspectives through its course and not a one of them was female threw me a little. Regardless, that has now been addressed, and as with the rest of the characters, it can be a little hit and miss. I found one of the new female characters brilliant and the other just kind of ‘meh’. This seems to be a pattern emerging with my opinions of all the characters in these books. Some are so wonderful that I could listen to all day, and some are just so-so. I don’t think any are written particularly badly, but some just lack that spark that makes them seem particularly unique, or at least three dimensional.

The story of this book (or at least the main storyline) concentrates heavily on warfare, something that is almost always going to get a thumbs up from me. However, that isn’t so much the case here. One of the main reasons for my lack of enthusiasm for a bit of classic stabby-stabby was a missed opportunity. Without giving too much away, King’s Guard treats us to a true rarity in fantasy novels. It’s something that I’ve always hunted for and have rarely found done right: that being an ‘under-war’, warfare within a subterranean landscape. Here, as you can probably guess, it involves dwarves, and the book spends a serious amount of time on said war, and yet it doesn’t really bless us to anything new. The reason I am always hunting for a good under-war is that it provides the author with the opportunity to really spread their wings to stitch together methods of carrying out a campaign in an environment that is so alien to the normal manner of one army facing off against another in the open field. An example of this comes from Stormlight Archive with the war on the Shattered Planes. It may have even been that example that got me hooked on trying to find books with novel takes on warfare, and King’s Guard has a significant portion of the book taking place within such an unusual war. The trouble is that Moss hardly does anything with it. Oh sure, there are one or two sections which offer a little more variety than your standard war, but not much. No three-dimensional battlefields of strata-layered defences. No burrowing worms ridden into battle like subterranean steeds. There isn’t even a great deal of information given about the dwarves themselves. Again, in my last review I admired the fact that Moss didn’t spend too long going into great detail about the dwarves in his universe. They were just a people that were there and everyone accepted them. But to have a huge chunk of your book take place within a dwarven kingdom and for me to come away with nothing but a cursory understanding of anything about how that kingdom even works… well, it just seems a little anticlimactic.

This brings me on to my next point. At several times in the book it seems to just skim over fairly major events, things that, as listeners/readers we would have really liked to have seen, the greatest of which is the climax to the whole under-war. At several points we are just pushed along down the storyline and told almost in passing that ‘oh, and such and such happened,’ when said event was kind of a big deal. The story itself is, only in places mind, a little procedural. You know: these are the good guys and these are the bad guys, and they are good because they are good and they are bad because they are bad. It lacks any real nuance. I realise now that this review is starting to sound bad, like I didn’t enjoy the book, but that simply isn’t the case. Did I like it? Yes. Did I love it? No, and the reason for that is the same reason I’m sounding rather harsh, and that is because this book had potential, buckets of it. Just as I’m thinking that it’s starting to lift itself above the mire of the thousands of just so-so fantasy novels, it trips over its own feet and stumbles back into the muck of mediocrity. If this wasn’t a very good book then I’d just say so and be done with it, but it is a good book. I just feel that it could have been better.

Narration was top notch. Simon Vance is an old hand at the fantasy genre, and it did the book well to have a solid voice actor pull off a solid performance. 

Personal Score: 4.0 stars

Professional Score: 4.0 stars