The Ruin of Kings (A Chorus of Dragons, #1)
ARC provided by the publisher—Tor Books—in exchange for an honest review.
The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Convoluted and complex are probably understatements, but I don’t have any other words to describe the main attributes of this debut.
For those of you who don’t know, The Ruin of Kings have been the fantasy debut that Tor has been promoting heavily for several months now. This novel has been advertised as the debut of the year that’s targeted “For fans of George R. R. Martin, Robin Hobb, Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks, Brandon Sanderson, and Patrick Rothfuss”. I’ll be completely honest here, if any publisher or author decides to put all of these giant, super high profile fantasy authors’ references into a debut work by an unknown author, it seriously better be a masterpiece. I’m one of those readers who had their interest for this book sparked by that bold claim, and I jumped at the chance of reading and reviewing it early; expecting it to be a debut that will go down into my ‘best of all time’ lists. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
“A hero who has never had a bad thing happen to him isn’t a hero—he’s just spoiled.”