Genre: High Fantasy with vampires and guns!
Basic Summary: Follows a dude named Tammen as he has a career in the military and has to face things like goblins and the undead.
Rating: 3/5
Warnings: Has violence cause, you know, its about war.
Review:
Gedlund is a novel that is unlike most high fantasy novels I’ve read. This is, mostly, a great thing. Gedlund has revolvers and other type of guns which was incorporated nicely throughout the novel and battle scenes. The Everlords, which come later in the book, are members of the undead and I thought “Oh, this is going to be so out of place” but the author did a good job of incorporating vampires and other types of undead monsters and making them unique.
Tammen is a new soldier and it was great to see his growth throughout the story. He and the rest of the main characters had distinct personalities. Even the “twins”, Claude and Gus, were fleshed out.
The author does an overall great job of character relationships and interactions. Dialogue was done well.
Now, some people may be wondering “Okay, but why the 3 star rating?” and here are the reasons:
The first hundred pages are set in this place called Rakhasin where the contingent Tammen is placed in fights goblins. After around a hundred pages, Tammen’s contingent gets pulled out and told to go to Gedlund. After that, there isn’t really a mention of Rakhasin in terms of the plot. It just seemed like the first hundred of pages didn’t benefit the plot? At least, not in a way I could see. The pages in themselves were well written and entertaining, I just wish there was a sort of…full circle effect?
Next, there were a couple of times I was taken out of the story due to oddities that popped up which I was confused about. For example, while a character is dodging the undead, he says something along the lines “I always wanted to be a matador!”. And it’s not that authors can’t use words like matador or things in this world in their books but rather, it made me think “Is there a place like Spain in this book? Is there a language like Spanish? Is there Spanish?”. It’s such a small thing but for me, it’s something that stands out enough for me to remember it.
Overall, the book was entertaining and I will be interested to read the next book.
May you get lost in a book,
Chrissy