Mark Lawrence's Reviews > We Ride the Storm

This book came joint 2nd out of 300 entries to the 4th Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off contest from a field of 300 entries!

https://mark---lawrence.blogspot.com/...

It's a pretty long book so it has taken me a while to read, but I really enjoyed it! I think for me the defining feature that raises it above almost all the SPFBO entries I've read and above most books in general is the quality of the prose. For those that care about such things - and many readers do not - it's a really well written book. The language never descends into flowery but is used to excellent effect painting evocative scenes, capturing reactions, delivering thoughts and emotions that ring true, and generating excitement where needed.

To back that up we have an engaging story told through the eyes of three interesting characters. Princess Miko is the least original of the three but manages in many ways to be the most entertaining - the Asian influence is strong here and I got some echoes of Feist & Wurts' Mistress of the Empire with a female protagonist using her intelligence and other prowess to navigate a political court and later to gather power and engage in battle.
Rah is a minor leader in a nomadic horse tribe whose people become a kind of slave-mercenary force for the empire opposing the one Miko inhabits. Madson does some nice world-building here, centred on their horse-culture and tradition of decapitating the corpses of fallen friends and enemies alike.
Cassandra is the most unusual, an assassin / prostitute who has a novel form of split personality and strange powers over the dead.

I've enjoyed historical fiction like James Clavell's Shōgun, and Asian inspired fantasy like the aforementioned Mistress of the Empire, and this carries shades of both while being its own, highly entertaining thing.

The story reaches a crescendo but it's very definitely book 1 of a series with scads of questions left demanding answers. So, I look forward to the next instalment.

Definitely one of the best books to come out of the SPFBO and certainly worth your attention. It's being re-released, so I think you have to pre-order it at the moment, so do that! Madson's an exciting new (to traditional publishing) author who should do well.



Join my Patreon
Join my 3-emails-a-year newsletter #prizes



...