Mark Alder

Honestly this was not my jam. It sounded so much like me but no. By the end I didn't care if all the characters suddenly died. I got about half way through and realised that I didn't want to read the sequels and wondered if I should finish it. I should have gone with the impulse and just stopped reading this tome.
The premise that Angels and demons are real and incarnate in the world and that they support particular countries. Only they're vainglorious and it feels like everyone is fairly corrupt and basically evil. I found it quite wearing, there were no characters that I found sympathetic in this story and it made it quite stressful to read. It appears that Angels and Demons are the minions of God and it's only Lucifer who is good and he has been cast down to hell with only one person able to rescue him
And honestly after a few days I find myself not really remembering much about the book apart from the fact that I disliked the read and feel no guilt about that.
A world full of angels and demons and magic should be a world full of wonders but this was a world full of meh.… (plus d'informations)

What if the outcome of battles in a war rested on the intervention of angels or demons? What if angels weren’t the benevolent spirits they are depicted but guardians of a hierarchical system defined by Heaven and replicated on earth? What if devils are actually prison guards for Heaven keeping demons locked up? What if the reason demons must be locked up is that they wish to help the poor overthrow those hierarchical systems on earth? What if Edward III, faced with the fact that Heaven doesn’t see him as the rightful ruler of Great Britain and chooses to throw all of the weight of angels behind France, is offered the support of demons that have managed to elude their guards and escaped from Hell? What if angels can be killed? Those and many more issues are raised in Son of the Morning by author Mark Alder in this epic alternate historical fantasy set at the beginning of the Hundred Years War.

This is a fairly long book (well over 600 pgs) told from a great many points of view including those of some of Hell’s denizen’s. Despite its length, this felt very much like the first in a series which, in fact, it is. It introduces us to seemingly dozens of characters, some actual historical figures and some fictional, some very complex world-building, again some based on history and some not, including a foray into Hell, as well as an intricate theological system and concomitant heresies that are very much a part of the story and which interestingly enough reflect many of the beliefs at a time marked by the declining authority of the Church, some of which some Christians might find offensive. Unfortunately, although much of this was interesting, there were places where it seemed a bit draggy and, at others, somewhat confusing as it moves back and forth between characters, events, and places.

Overall, though I found the book compelling and, if at times, I found it confusing, the story kept me interested enough that, even when it was a bit slow, I always found myself wanting to read further to see what would happen and how all of the spiritual beings would continue to fit into the narrative. I am definitely looking forward to reading the next in the series and would recommend this to anyone who enjoys historical fantasies.

I received this book from Edelweiss and the publisher in exchange for an honest review… (plus d'informations)

This book was a disappointment. I started to read the story in earnest, because I was thrilled at the idea of fantasy set in one of my favorite historical periods, the IV century. From the blurb I expected a solid, complex plot, plenty of intrigue, captivating characters, bloody battles, charming worldbuilding and evocative descriptions. I am familiar with several aspects and characters of the Hundred Years’ War so I was excited at the prospect of Heaven, Hell and all its denizens meshing with the political and military strife of such a well-known background.
The story is indeed complex and it features a sizable cast of characters, there are different plotlines with a convergence trend and the prologue is very intriguing (sadly also the last you see of setting development). Maybe I was expecting too much, but the book fell short on several fronts.

The main flaw is that it is a plot-heavy book with flat characters.

The antagonists are duly evil and the protagonists seriously ambiguous, only two of them are vaguely decent persons. Very fine, I can come to care for unsympathetic scoundrels and I’m always eager to read about labyrinthine personalities and grey moralities, to search for hidden motives behind the obvious and guess at the redeeming potentials. Sadly I didn’t have to dig at all because there was little or none character growth. Most of them felt like they were following a set script in order to shoehorn the plot into preordained situations, often turning out shallow and inconsistent; there are children who act as adults, clever people who remain flinty in their courses of action when anyone else would start to reconsider and hard guys who have too sudden changes of heart. As a result, I failed to connect with any of the characters and none truly fascinated me either, which is also a drawback.

If nothing else I wished I could despise some of them, but how can you find rebarbative villains so foolishly evil or protagonists so obsessively monothematic?

Another consequence of this lack of roundness is that all the characters have to often explain how they feel and their actions to involve the reader (unfortunately in a very repetitive manner: Montagu mooning over Isabella for the nth time and illustrating yet again the motivations of his dilemma, or Edward imparting the same lesson in war finances, the divine right of kings and how harrowing his choices are, again and again…). The elucidations supplied for some of the most brow-raising behaviors simply reinforced my difficulty to feel emotionally engaged. Conversely, there is no overabundance of details as to how their intuitions come about, or about the mystique of the otherwordly or the unfolding agendas of the many factions involved.

One-dimensional characters are a killjoy in tale with serious themes, but I can accept plot over characterization if there is a captivating story and a very structured design. Undoubtedly this book has many interesting ideas and subplots, there are battles and skirmishes, mysteries, opposed interests, a touch of Sleeping Beauty (complete with briar roses), danbrownesque conspiracies, different POVs, intricate quests, the kings’ sport and a lot of upheaval in Heaven’s and Hell’s hierarchies.

Unfortunately, this richness of themes and the complexity itself backfires.

Before long the various characters' paths cross in different, intricate ways, and several scenes are entirely too convoluted, some exchanges so oblique to result artificial, not piquant. That's fine occasionally, I personally don't like it much when characters engage in awkward dialogues just for the reader’s sake or overexplain, but too much vagueness doesn’t deepen the atmosphere of mystery when no firm worldbuilding and no notable characterization sustain the action; the more complexity, the subtler the handling needed.

I think this is the second main weakness of the book: when the narrative swings from too little information to redundancies and back again, the understanding is fragmented and the likely outcome is not thrilling tension, but deep confusion. Also my suspension of disbelief was sorely tested, not for the world depicted, but because several things that happen to further the plot are too convenient to be acceptable. Basically, the unpredictability is contrived; the tale suffers from too many jarring plot devices introduced to prevent the many storylines and layered intrigues from getting out of hand.
As would be expected I rarely felt the story moving with ease and grace. I won’t dwell on all the finer points, but the overall upshot was that my reading pace was slower and I got easily distracted, with a mounting sense of pointlessness.

The book has its moments, surely, and a few exciting twists. I liked the prose, definitely its best feature: the action spans from England to France to Italy and the descriptions are vivid, particularly those of the churches and the riches the angels require for residences up their standard of beauty. There is a nice amount of dark humor, particularly when the comic-relief character (Osbert) starts to adapt to his new circumstances, and I really loved that, he’s dully self-serving and changes innerly not a whit throughout the entire ordeal, in a nutshell he is the most pragmatic of the lot, and probably the only one who doesn’t care about antichrists, eternal souls, internecine conflicts and parricides. Particularly around two-thirds of the book, when the plot is in full hyperbole, there are some hilarious exchanges which added a fitting levity to the cascade of events.

Pace and rhythm were fine and the slow beginning to fast denouement scheme is truly appropriate considering the large scope of the story. However, when as a reader I don’t trust the author to properly deliver anymore, all I can focus on are the shortcomings and I probably fail to appreciate any wrap-up. Not that there was a substantial shift of gears anywhere in the book but again, among flat characters, unbalanced information, arbitrary author decisions and a meandering plot at some point I stopped trying to make head or tail of what was happening. I don’t think even in parodies you can just conjure surprises out of nowhere, there must needs be some in-story consistency and constraint.

And the climax? No payoff, just a frustrating open ending.

I can’t shake this feeling of disharmony and unrealised potential. Son of the Morning is an ambitious work, there are all the makings of a compelling story but the result is too sprawly and I was underwhelmed by the performance. It did not make me run for the hills - I had to force myself to reach the end but I wanted to because the tale somehow pulled me - I am just extremely disappointed that reading this book has not been enjoyable at all.

"Strive for the best outcome, prepare for the worst."
… (plus d'informations)