Is it to make them seem more villainous, which would then imply that female sexuality is bad and is something to be controlled. Nevertheless, it makes for a slower start, when an author has to cycle through the perspectives while introducing all the main players, and the first couple hundred pages were dedicated to this task.

Kazim While there is not a single thing I don’t hate about Kazim, the majority of those are skilled character-building measures. The nation of Yuros has been plagued with civil war but is still considered the stronger of the two nations due to the fact that they caused significant damage during the previous campaigns. And here I am, mere days after starting it, having been yanked through the rest of the book in a frenzy of magic, love, lies, blood, and politics.

Needless to say, the third Moontide is coming and the tensions between different political designs are at a breaking point. On the western side of the world (Yuros) we get multiple POV characters and also get an inside view into the political decisions that surround the upcoming crusade.

It's a classic example of a book which has been compared to Game of Thrones (as so many are these days) but I would actually go so far as to say that this is worthy of a comparison to Game of Thrones in terms of the politics and the characters and the world building. A half-blood will have a little less, a quarter-blood a little less again and so on, right down to a sixteenth. In summary, if you've never heard of this or read it go and check it out because it was just wonderful and every element is perfect (remember what a mess Dinosaur Lords was - yeah, this is proof of what a GOOD fantasy should be! Brett should find A LOT to love about this book, but if you’re looking for the next Steven Erikson or R. The story was described as a bloody crusade between two sides set in a dark medieval world with heavy hints of Arabic culture, and even a comparison to R.Magic is passed down through heritage starting from the ascendant mages who built the Leviathan Bridge. The next Moontide is coming in a year, and The Rondian Emperor wants to use this time to rule both continents, but this time the people of Athiopia will be prepared. We also get to visually imagine the places our characters travel between because the descriptions of markets, castles, towers, spices and scents are all so well described and make you feel fully immersed. I have a mixed feeling—mostly negative—towards the first half of the book; I won’t lie, if it weren’t because I own the entire quartet already, I think I would’ve DNFed this book.