4 Niska Niska من عند Gbei-Vonwea, ليبيريا من عند Gbei-Vonwea, ليبيريا

Well, the good news is that this novel actually got a bit better than I thought at first, but it's still not the earth-shattering genre-defining debut that the nice publicity folks at Tor make it out to be. In terms of world-building, it reminded me a bit of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. Fantasy-world that once had advanced technology but now has reverted to standard medievaloid status, aside from some remnants of those high-tech times still being around and/or being re-discovered. (I always thought that was the most interesting thing about WoT, and that flashback scene in one of the books where you go back to the high times of the Aes Sedai was fantastic, but I still gave up in book 8.) In "Lamentation", a religious order acts as the keeper of the knowledge of those times, and in the first 5 pages or so, that order's central city gets completely obliterated by a magic spell that was originally designed by the order's rival, about 2000 years ago. Oh, and the moon is terraformed, which gets mentioned in passing but really piqued my interest. So far, so good. The aspect of this novel I really didn't like is, frankly, the characterization. To make another comparison, I felt like Scholes was going for Guy Gavriel Kay. There's a hero, tragic and glamourous and strong and romantic, a soldier of soldiers, loved by all his men, blahdeeblah. When GGK does this, you feel like you know that man. You admire him. You want to meet him and shake his hand. You know? He can make you care about his characters. With Scholes, it feels more like they're... templates. He does everything right, and the characters say and do all the right things, but there's just no connection. I just didn't feel it. Not just with Rudolpho (the heroic soldier-king), but also with Neb-the-orphan-scholar) or Jin Li Tam, the nobleman's daughter (and consort of the cardboard-cut-out villain) who of course falls in love with Rudolpho. They're all recognizable and definitely have some depth, but just not the level of depth I was hoping for. This may be a case of overly high expectations (that's what you get for hyping this thing to pieces), but the end result is that I felt let down. Not that this makes any sense whatsoever, but I kept wishing Scholes had handed his world and story over to Kay. So. A good story, set in an interesting world, peopled with characters I didn't give a damn about. It has a lot of potential, and I may actually read the next book (I believe there are 5 installments projected --- at least it's not another trilogy), but I just didn't feel satisfied after reading it. Maybe I'm just becoming jaded (ha). Anyway, I give it three stars. Also, you know what? Given that this is only his first novel, I think this guy could turn out something really good in the future. There's definite talent there.