Okay guys! I told you that I would review a book for this post and I am a woman of my word. It took me a while to think of a good book to review. I don’t often have negative reviews of books and when I do they are vehement negative reviews. So I just searched for a book that I read recently that I really enjoyed. I decided to write a review on the book Mystic Warrior by Tracy and Laura Hickman.
First, I’d like to start by saying that my views on this book might be slightly different than others for two reasons. The first being that I have read this book twice. My sister owns a copy of this book and I read the first chapter and then read something else and never came back to it. Later I read the description for this book on an audiobook and decide to give it a try. After listening to the first chapter I realized it was the one that I had started that my sister owned. It might’ve been because I wasn’t in the mood to read it at the time or because I preferred the audiobook, but I prefer to go with the later description. I loved the audiobook of this book.
The audio was amazing. It was read by Narrator Lloyd James. He gave voices to every character and without a specific note from the author as to who was speaking I knew exactly who was speaking. This was kind of fun when characters showed up from previous parts of the book and the author was making it suspenseful by not using their name and you could try to figure it out by the voice that Lloyd James was using. Some of the characters had funny voices and some sounded just like I imagined they would.
This story takes place in three different worlds which is just as confusing as it sounds. The part that links them together is that the three main characters, one from each world, can see each other in some sort of dream like state. This magic connects them and so everything that happens in each world in connected to the other in some way. My problem with this part of the plot line wasn’t that it was confusing because honestly it wasn’t that bad, my problem with it was that I didn’t find the other two worlds entertaining. In Galen’s world, the human world of the story, I was interested in what was happening. There was conflict and multiple characters and it was a good plot line. The fairy world would be next in interest by I couldn’t understand their conflict and it wasn’t all that entertaining. There wasn’t enough time in that world to make it entertaining. The least entertaining was the world of the goblins. There was even less time in this world than the other two. I didn’t care about the main goblin character and sometimes when those parts of the story came up I wished I could skip it to get back to one of the other two worlds.
On the note of the characters: the ones in the human world were great! They were all super interesting. The main human character, however, I did not like. He seemed a little to whiney. He wouldn’t accept what was happening and even thought he did the things he had to in the story he denied that he was doing them as the story progressed. I wanted him to die which is never a good thing for a main character. I did like Rhea just as much as I hated her. She was a well-developed character and I hated her so much. She was constantly hiding stuff from the main character and trying to get him to do the things that she wanted. She was the perfect character to hate. Maddoc bugged me. I really didn’t like how he was always hinting at stuff that just confused the other characters. He was also a great character and as a writer I appreciated all the thought that went into his character but as a reader I hated him. All the side characters who were important later, Galen’s wife and the dwarf friend and the high inquisitor, where interesting but I didn’t find any of them particularly interesting. My favorite character from the human world was Galen’s sword. Yes Galen can talk to man made objects. That was the best part. His sword was snarky, a bit to into fighting, and loved to talk about how awesome he was. His name was S’shnickt. I loved him so much! He was the best character out of all of them in my opinion.
The fairy realm really only had two characters that were interesting and that was Dwynwyn the fairy seeker who was the main character and the princess she was in charge of protecting named Aislynn. All the other characters were flat or didn’t draw my attention. The goblin world was even worse. The main character was named Mimic who really had no thoughts of his own that stood throughout the story. He didn’t really act. He was acted upon. All the other characters acted upon him and in the end when he won it wasn’t because of anything he did it was the magic that won for him. That really bugged me.
Despite all the negative things I have said about this book in the end I liked it. Mind you I didn’t love it. It was just decently interesting. The second book (which I just finished a couple days ago) was a lot more interesting but it definitely built upon the first book a lot. I am anticipating that the third book, with two previous books to build upon, will be even better than the first two. All in all I would say that if you enjoy reading for the thinking this was a good book for that. But I would highly recommend the audiobook.
Alright guys! So that’s all that I have this week. Sorry if it wasn’t the kind of review you were looking forward to, but I enjoyed writing it. Next weeks will be Map Drawing – Sites VS Paper. It is definitely an opinion piece so give me your opinion on it as well. See you next week!