A Bastard's Birthright
J.E. Payne
An everything fantasy adventure
JE Payne's ABB has everything you want in a fantasy adventure: humble but badass buddy soldiers, sorcerers, pretty girls, badass girls, pretty badass girl sorcerers, elder gods, a little romance... (It also has, in its title, a word that is absolutely forbidden in an Amazon review, for which reason I abbreviate it ABB.)
It was not unentertaining, and I read with pleasure most of the time. However, I was glad to reach the end, and I was left with a feeling of disappointment that I have trouble explaining. After all, I am a Fantasy and Science Fiction fan, and we have here all the kind of stuff here that is found in other books I love.
And that, I think, is the problem. ABB never surprises. I don't mean that it's predictable. If I roll a die and get a six, that is not surprising, even though it was unpredictable.
It is not easy to surprise. To surprise, you have to create an expectation, then break it. And not with a random something else: ideally it should be a bigger and better or more evil or impressively weirder something. ABB has the stuff in it that a fantasy adventure should have. But I never found myself saying, "Whoa! I wasn't expecting that!"
I thank NetGalley and BooksGoSocial for an advance reader copy of ABB. This review expresses my honest opinion.