My dear bookish friends,
Today I have for you a review of another blog tour book, another one I really liked!! I love finding (and liking!) books I wouldn’t normally pick up myself through blog tours, and The Ventifact Colossus was one of them!
A big thank you to TheWriteReads and the author Dorian Hart for my spot on the tour, as well as my review ecopy of the book (which in no way influenced my review!).
The Blurb
A tale of epic fantasy begins…
Banished to an otherworldly prison for centuries, the monstrous Emperor Naradawk is about to break free and wreak havoc upon the world of Spira. The archmage Abernathy can no longer keep the monster at bay, and has summoned a collection of would-be heroes to help set things right.
Surely he made a mistake. These can’t be the right people.
Dranko is priest-turned-pickpocket, expelled from his church for his antics. Kibilhathur is a painfully shy craftsman who speaks to stones. Aravia is a wizard’s apprentice whose intellect is eclipsed only by her arrogance. Ernest is a terrified baker’s son. Morningstar is a priestess forbidden from daylight. Tor is a young nobleman with attention issues. Ysabel is an elderly farm woman. Grey Wolf is a hard-bitten mercenary.
None of them are qualified to save the world, but they’ll have to do. Even Abernathy himself seems uncertain as to why he chose them.
What starts with a simple scouting mission soon spirals into something more far-reaching and sinister. The heroes will contest with dream warriors, evil cultists, sentient gemstones, and a devious yet infuriatingly polite gentleman with a perfect mustache, on their way to a desperate encounter with the unstoppable: The Ventifact Colossus.
My Review
This book had me from the opening line! I love a nice tight opening line that makes you nod and think, ‘ok, I think this author can write’.
Ventifact Colossus has all the elements of your classic Epic Fantasy. We have an ancient and super powerful evil emperor versus a band of unlikely heroes gathered together by an archmage to try and stop him. They have no idea why they were chosen, as they really are an unlikely bunch of misfits, and even the archmage himself seems to have no idea.
We have the fairly popular approach of each character having their own chapters. Personally, I’m a big fan of this approach when done well because you get to see the story from different sets of eyes, and it is really done well here. It allows us to really get in the head of the individual characters and begin to pick out favourites.
The characters are all flawed in their own separate ways, which is great, there is nothing I hate more than the perfect, flawless, supremely beautiful or handsome types who are just great at everything. It is much easier to feel with them that way. Here, we have a bunch of misfits bumbling their way along and its great – exactly how it should be! What I found very interesting from the start was how the main character was described. Dranko was once a cleric, now he is a thief. Oh, and.. he is part goblin! Not to be overlooked, as the tusks give it away very soon.
Ventifact Colossus is well-written throughout. The first few chapters are super long so I found it a bit hard to keep going at first (I have a hard time with long chapters) but they get shorter afterwards which made the story seemingly faster for me too! But this is just a personal preference, I’m sure others might find long chapters immersive!
One thing that I was particularly appreciative of was the fact that unlike many in the genre today the author doesn’t rely on heavy amounts of extreme violence and lots of bad language. I’m not sure why that has become so common in the genre (at least in my experience lately) so it was nice to see an author not having to resort to that too much, and instead writing something that doesn’t require the softer reader to wince on every other page.
Unfortunately, the book does end on a cliff hanger, but I think I can forgive the author for that. He has to set up the sequel after all!
4 stars from me for this old-fashioned adventure featuring a bunch of misfits that come to work together, seemingly by chance. If you are looking for an epic fantasy without much grimness and violence, this is the book for you!
Thank you all so much for reading!
xoxo
Noly
