Marcus Lee

Book source ~ Tour

I did a First Impressions for this book in a tour back on July 29th. I was only 38% in, but was really enjoying it. Real Life has finally let me finish it. Yay!

I have a love/hate relationship with epic fantasy. The first book in any series usually frustrates me. There are so many characters that need introduced as well as fast world building being done that I spend the better part of book 1 confused. This is not the fault of any author. It's just how epic fantasy is written and I do love it. I really do. Once I get past all the beginning intros and memorize the strange names and places then I fall in and never want to come out.

With "Kings & Daemons" the beginning of book 1 is slower than I'm used to with not as much world building. For some, this is an issue, but for me it's a relief. I'm able to keep places and people straight and I'm able to invest in it that much quicker. Three of the main characters are Maya, Taran, and Kalas. All are shaping up to be great characters. Then there's some side characters who are proving to be very interesting: Rakan, Astren, and Alano. And no story is complete without a villain, the Witch-King. Wow. What an asshat. At the time of my First Impressions, the characters are pretty much established at this point in the story (38%), the stage is set, and the pieces are moving toward their destinations.

I’m happy to report that I quite enjoyed this story. Usually Epic Fantasy is complicated with so many POVs moving toward a goal until they finally come together. While there are several POVs in this tale, it seems to be slimmed down and a bit more manageable. Instead of looking like Mr. Universe it’s more like an Olympic swimmer, sleek and fast. The plot unfolds at an even rate, the characters are great, and the whole thing is coming together. I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series.… (plus d'informations)

This review is also featured on Behind the Pages: Kings and Daemons

A huge thank you to Marcus Lee who sent me a copy of Kings & Daemons!

Daleth the Witch-King is slowly bleeding the countryside and its people of life. But with the death of the land and its people, his eternal youth is beginning to slip. Daleth sets his eyes on the Freestates, a land teeming with life ready to be concurred and drained. But what he doesn’t expect is a young girl born with a power to combat his own. When Maya's power forces her to come out of hiding, she will embark on an unexpected quest. One that will pit her against the Witch-King’s gifted soldiers, and force her full potential.

Kings & Daemons isn’t your typical good versus evil storyline. Readers will certainly see which characters strive to bring life back to the kingdom, but the road is full of choices. And not all of those choices will allow them to walk away with a clean conscience. Kalas is the perfect example of a good character who struggles against the uncertainty of his actions.

The concept of the daemon possessed soldiers was fascinating. Marcus Lee eases in a good deal of history by introducing Kalas and his past. Readers will follow the daemon possessed soldier and watch his constant battle with the creature inhabiting his body. And for all Kala’s good intentions, the daemon is a manipulative and powerful entity.

All the characters throughout Kings & Daemons had solid foundations and arcs throughout the story. There was even a bit of romance blossoming as the story progressed. Though at times I thought the humor certain characters used didn’t quite fit their personalities or the situations they were in. I still enjoyed watching each of them develop and discover more about themselves

Marcus Lee also puts little details into his writing that really brought it all together for me. There were certain challenges each character faced that seemed so normal, and yet would cascade into something more challenging. This brought a healthy dose of realism to the writing amidst all the fantastical elements.

Fans of traditional high fantasy will be swept up in the world-building and characters in Kings & Daemons. Magic, romance, mystery, and more can be found within its pages.… (plus d'informations)

I received a complimentary copy of "Kings and Daemons" direct from the author Marcus Lee in exchange for an honest review. I did not receive compensation for my opinions or thoughts shared herein.

From the moment you first begin reading Kings and Daemons you feel the immersive experience of entering into a High Fantasy world illuminated by a storyteller who understands how to emotionally grab your attention from page one! You don't have to wait long to feel a sense of what is happening in this world and how high the stakes are for the people within in it to maintain a sense of silence and silent omission. This isn't a world for the faint of heart either (due to their extreme childbirth fatality rates) nor is it one that allows you an easy entrance to where you could see yourself living inside it because of the restrictive nature of the citizens who appear to have to watch their every move otherwise someone else will be doing that with high consequences! Lee enables you to disappear into this enchanted and challenging world with the ease of anchouring you into Maya's self-discovery journey towards believing in her gift and using it to see what she can transform out of the beauty of what her gift provides her and the living environs around her simply through touch or presence. (at least in the beginning - I had a keen sense her gift might be more profoundly expansive lateron)

I was truly bewitched and enchanted by how Lee has writ this novel - you feel so dearly rooted to both Maya and Taran whilst your reading that you can barely notice anything else in your own world after you've entered theirs! So much so, when Maya was being pursued by a hunger-mad pack of wolves it brought me back instantly to seeing The Neverending Story for the first time as a child and the terrifying moment where Atreyu has to defend himself against a wolf. Not since that cinematic moment have I found another writer whose writ such a harrowing account of predator vs prey when it involves a wild animal and a human. You are on the very edge of your seat as you want to encourage Maya as she flees for her life but then, at that moment where both instinct and hope seem lost - it is a battle of will to turn the pages and see what happened!

When Lee reveals another layer of Taran's gift in that tavern it gave an interesting new spin on telepathy and how that skill set has more power behind the talent than what can be readily surmised by what telepathy can reveal to the person who has the gift. It was an interesting exercise about how sometimes the best way to diffuse a situation is not by taking the straight path towards that end but by taking a secondary option which has an even fuller response than the first action might have had itself! I loved how Lee balanced both the truths of this world he's built - wherein the people are both war hungry and violently motivated to do the bidding of their King whilst at the same time, there are opposing forces coming into play from such unsuspecting warriors that it illuminates how sometimes heroes and heroines are not found where you think they are but they have the most incredible story to be told.

The character who I would have felt would have been the clear-cut antagonist for this story (Rakan) had much more to him than meets the eye. Yes his back-story tells a difficult story of survival and an equally hard to swallow path he took towards vigilante justice but when you see him showing mercy when it wasn't asked of him and how his own perception of his life had become altered through the intervention of another - you saw that the lines between good and evil are more blurred than they are easily defined. A credit to Lee for spinning the script in front of us and surprising us by such a clever twist in the plot!

This is a cautionary tale about what you seek out and what is sought can become a worse nightmare than the reason behind why you sought what you did. In this instance there is an unleashing of demonic daemons which have a profound effect on both the King and the men who serve under him to the point that whomever they were in their former lives became erased by this exchange because the daemons in this world which were drawn from the gates of darkness itself were not benign but rather insidiously evil. Their own influence on these men provided their own solitary horrors and the only escape was through death. Death is both a penalty and a release of torture in the Ember Kingdom - it is widely used as the number act of punishment for whomever steps out of line as the magistrate herein is known as an overseer and trust me, that is not someone you want to cross! Why this King and his followers chose to seek such a dark entity to bring such a soulless and deathly pallor to cover this world thick and through is beyond me! You would have thought they might have come up with a better solution to their troubles but they instead went straight for the answer which was worse than any living nightmare they could have imagined!

Similar to traditional stories of Sword and Sorcery plots Kings and Daemons leans heavy on the action sequencing and the repetitive fighting which ends in a bloodbath. The only difference is Lee has tempered the violent showdowns and only every now and then leads into a scene or passage I felt was a bit too much for me personally and I could have had those moments more glossed over than described. The fuller truth of it is that this is a war hungry world - everyone finds a reason to fight and if death is the end result so the better. It is a hard world to live in as a reader because of how its painted black with all the darkness erasing all the Light - a leftover effect of the daemons presence in the hearts of certain men and the insanity of behaviour on behalf of the Witch-King who has become overtaken by the worst of the daemons living in the Ember Kingdom.

I have a feeling if the people gain their true freedom from his oppressive rule and by the shadowing of this world by the daemons who only seek to cause wreckage and unrest - I believed this world could become a new mecca of forgiveness, re-genesis of the natural world and a peace unlike this world had known previously. We will have to remain patient to see how it plays out in the next installments but this is a strong foundation and entrance into a new Dark Fantasy world where the grip of darkness is seeking to erase the Light.

// This is a quotation of my full review originally shared via jorielovesastory.com… (plus d'informations)