It makes for a great page-turner of a book but it gets wearing after a while. But almost every chapter finished with some kind of twist or reversal, a ‘you’ll never guess what happens next…’ moment. There are more fights and battles than you can shake a starstone stick at. I was reasonably confident that most people would survive except those that ‘shouldn’t’. The characters arrive fully formed.Ģ – when it became apparent that there weren’t going to be any deaths of any of the main characters, it took the tension away from the numerous fights. I can think of one ‘baddie’ who is secretly a ‘goodie’ (Camlin), and a couple of characters who are morally ambiguous (Conal and Meical). There are two main reasons:ġ – they are essentially good or bad. There is nothing wrong with this mix of ingredients – they are a staple of this genre. I missed the whore with a heart of gold and the hard-bitten alcoholic with marital problems but who is good at his job (sorry, wrong genre trope) but you kind of get the picture. There’s even a soldier who becomes a gladiator/ folk hero and rallies his fellow slaves in the arena. There are monsters and non-humans, traitors and bad people who are secretly good. You’ve got a vast cast: a reluctant chosen one, meddlesome gods and devious rulers, hardworking gentlefolk, esoteric master swordsmen & women, honourable warriors whose oath is their bond, feisty women, students who outstrip their masters, royal bastards, loving parents who would die for their kids, intelligent animals and a cantankerous crone. As a result of these two points, I almost quit at the halfway mark of Malice (Book One).īefore I get to the reason why I kept reading, a little more about the books. If deliberate or not, it’s still a nice tip of the hat to Gemmell.) In both series, the story can seem to flip ahead and around.

(I’m sure I caught a blue and green cloak in The Faithful and the Fallen. I had the same issue with David Gemmell’s Rigante series, which this series is similar to. Not helping that were the jumps in time and scenes. Until around the ¾ mark of Book One, I couldn’t remember who was who. And that, was the first issue I had with the books. 66 million people) including several thousand giants and some talking birds.

I’m guessing it’s the same sort of size as Western Europe (with/ without the UK…) and that’s a lot of people to get to know (+/- c.

I felt that in Book One I was being introduced to every person in the Banished Lands. (Have I said that?) With lots of characters. This is going to be a short review of a huge series.

John gwynne faithful and the fallen