Valen starts out as a magical drug addict and a bit of an opportunist hedonist, but when you realize what he's been through, you can't blame him. The author keeps making up weird words every few pages, but once you get into it Valen's story is interesting, and I feel a lot of sympathy over his desire for freedom and the ability to control his own fate. I don't know what it says about me that I actually quite liked it and immediately started the next book-probably that I grew up on late 90s and early 00s fantasy and that I probably ought to mention this to a therapist. Normally this would be a 2 or 3 star read and I'd move on with my life.

A lot of exposition and world building in lieu of storytelling. In short, I think we conflated different types of excitement, to the detriment of the story. We spend a LOT of time in the 'belle douleur' rather than anything actually happening to move the story along. I think there was a period of time where pain was sort of the kink du jour and instead of dealing with trauma we just kept showing it and showing someone suffering beautifully. So, in the grand tradition of late 90s/early 2000s fantasy, this guy goes through the ringer, twice and once on fire.

What we end up with is the most phallic fixation in an epic I've read in quite some time and a lingering question about imitation and appreciation. There's a sort of patriarchal inception going on, where she thinks that she needs to be relatable to the presumed audience of men, so she spends a LOT of time talking about taking maidens in haystacks and drinking until a lass brings you home and all that. Woman writing men like they think men write men. I like that this is a complicated world, and that even the stereotypical doom cult feels that way because life is shit when you're a peasant in a feudal world and if the current system is leading to death by starvation, why not try literally anything else. A bit bloated, a bit repetitive and torture porny in a weird way (hang on, do I now think there's a NORMAL way to do torture porn?! Must examine this further) and then when everything starts coming together I couldn't put it down. I think this is a lot of it, I'm a sucker for masculine protagonists with daddy issues, and boy howdy does this one have that. I think, if I had to guesstimate, there are something like 5? different mysteries going on in this. I broke my own 'no reading series back to back' and 'no encouraging cliffhanger endings' rules for this book, and I really don't understand why.ĬONTENT WARNING: Torture, slavery, drug addiction/use, child abuse, elder abuse, body horror (missing eyes), war, religion

Flesh and Spirit by Carol Berg