Antonin Meiros, a mage of great renown (in fact, it was he who was the intellect behind the Leviathan Bridge) seeks a new wife, and travels to Lahk to wed Ramita. As the time draws nearer, the people on both sides prepare for war. The last two Moontides have involved crusades of conquest, thanks to the lofty ambitions of the Magi. Unfortunately, the passage is also a source of much bitterness and conflict. But every Moontide, the seas part to reveal the magnificent mage-crafted Leviathan Bridge, allowing trade and communication between the two continents. Yuros and Antiopia are two lands long separated by vast ocean. Suffice to say though, this book has it all: nations at war, clashing religions, political intrigue, mages and sorcery, multiple points of view. It would be impossible for me to go into every single thing I liked about this book without having to talk about why, because that would just lead to lengthy explanations into the details of the plot, and if I did that this review will end up being thirty pages long with half of it made up of spoilers.
Moontide quartet kazim series#
Martin's epic series stands uniquely on its own.but then so does David Hair's. ( )īooks like Mage's Blood are extremely hard for me to review, and not least of all because the many comparisons of this to A Song of Ice and Fire are mostly appropriate this first book of the Moontide Quartet is a sprawling epic indeed! Still, I'm of the mind that George R.R. Most of the first half of the book is devoted to setting up the characters and the world and it all builds up to a tense ending. Most of the secondary key characters (many of whom are religious fanatics or power hungry despots) are also quite well written. Alaron, Ramita and Elena are the three main protagonists. This is a character driven story and all the characters are very well developed. The author portrays the clash of cultures very well. Magic enables the western domination and the conquest of the east like a parallel to the technological superiority that enabled them to do that in the real world. The world and the cultures and the religions mirror our own. The story starts when it is one year until the leviathan bridge opens and both the sides are preparing for the third crusade. But avarice brings about the crusades of conquests. The leviathan bridge is deep under the oceans and is revealed and can be crossed only once every 12 years during the low tide. one group of mages dedicated to learning and peace manage to build a bridge that connects the two continents bringing prosperity to both the lands. The continents of Yuros and Antiopia have been isolated by the impassable seas, until the Rondians gain their godlike powers and cross the seas for the first time. Which is sad, because there are a few mysteries at the root of the special physics that looked really interesting. I just hadn't read anything very compelling so far, and at 89 pages, that's too long without. When the sixth chapter opened as the former fiance's POV, that's when I decided I fundamentally didn't care about anyone or anything in this book. First up was a capable and ruthless (and sneaky) spymaster, and I thought this was probably going to be my cup of tea, but later on we got to a whining student-wizard (complete with Malfoy-enemy and pureblood problems), a man who spends a whole chapter selling his daughter to the highest bidder, and then said daughter who spends her chapter having hysterics and begging for her prince (her former fiance, previously noted to be a hotheaded guy who thinks with his fists) to come save her.
Ninety pages was five chapters, each one introducing a new character, with some loose connections between some of them. But I like the info dumps to highlight interesting questions I want to see explored, and mostly all that was highlighted in this one was how strongly a representation of the Crusades this whole setup was. In the first 90 pages, we had some pretty big info dumps, which I am generally ok with, because fantasy worlds can be big. There's nothing really wrong with it - aside from the odd endlessly-claused sentence - but there's nothing about it that really grabs me and makes me want to stick around for 670-odd pages.