Author: Garth Nix

This book was donated to my ever-growing classroom library, along with the rest of the series, from a friend who promised it would be enticing to my students. However, he suggested I read it first before putting it on the shelf.

The suggestion to read it first was not a filtering mechanism, but he knew I was a lover of fantasy and would enjoy this as much as any other I’ve read. Fifty pages in, I wasn’t convinced.

That’s the usual point in the book where I turn it in and move on to something else. However, this was written in the nineties and I had to remind myself to get into the mindset of that era where fantasy was a slow grind with little, if any, payoff.

It wasn’t uncommon for a book to go nowhere for five hundred pages, but the world kept you in (cough Robert Jordan cough).

The worldbuilding on this one was fantastic and the background to the story was interesting, not to mention it had a strong female lead. All things that would’ve hooked me for that time.

Powering through, I finally hit a point in the last third of the book where things accelerated. It felt like, “Yes, this is what I came for now reward my patience.”

Unfortunately, it accelerates into the second book.

When relaying my frustration to my friend, he replied that yes, this is a sloooooooow burn, but when it ignites, it goes crazy. I saw some of that here, but I wish I could’ve seen more.

However, I’ll still make my way through book two.