Ordination

The Book in 1 Sentence

A warrior is called to serve an ancient god after being disgusted by his own and others actions against the innocent.

Brief Review

I am going to call this the surprise of the year. I expected this book to so different from what it was and could not have more wrong. Allister is a great character as are most of the main characters. This book's biggest issue for me is the lack of coherent world and there is a lot of "spiritual guidance" that happens in the beginning.

Why I Read this book

I have no idea where or when I picked up this book on Audible. I thought it was a recommendation from a friend of mine, but I asked and it wasn't her. Maybe after the other recommendations she gave me, since they were similar, it was in the same search or part of a 2-for-1-credit sale (Love those thing).

In-Depth Review (Favorite Quotes)

So this book starts in a couple of precursor scenes that don't make sense until later in the book, but they come back to pay small dividends later. The character building is really well done with a steady since of each person's history. My biggest issue with them is that the first half of the book there is a lot of internal conversation about "Why did I do this?" "I felt compelled to do this" "We should not do that" and later in the book it is explained to be guidance from the goddess. That feels cheap to me, but it does work for the story. I'm not mad about it, just feels like an injustice to the characters.

The item that really bothers me is there is no mental map that I am able to see to understand what is going on. I know the countries/realms, but no real since of what the world looks like (Might be an audible issue only as the book might have a map).

One of my favorite things from the author is the constant reminder of the character descriptions. For instance, Allister has a broken nose and when the author describes the actions on his face, they will remark about it or the broadness of his shoulders. And as someone who has a hard time remembering what characters look like, this has been a really nice reminder of what each character is like.

The fight scenes also are so well described that I can picture all of it without issue.

I made a comment about this not being what I expected and seeing the cover art, I should have known better, but what surprised me was the grounded sense of the magic in this world. I first off expected there to not be any, but then realized that was dumb as a paladin book. Then they have introduced the power/magic in this world in a slow steady sense without any one being overly powerful without a sense that the only way out is god like powers in the hero.

Rating

This book is an EASY 8. I want to give it a 9, but you can tell this book was intended as a trilogy based on the ending cliffhanger. I will say that even with it being a trilogy I expected it to be a lot slower, but there really isn't any part of the book that I feel is unneeded or interrupts the pacing of the book. Likewise, I really enjoyed this and will finish the series.

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