King's Folly by Jill WilliamsonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was an interesting book. It's hard to describe how I feel about it, which is one reason why this book floats between 3-4 stars for me (marked as 4/5 on Goodreads because I rounded up :p).
I like big tomes I can really dig into, and this story did it for me. The story flowed pretty well throughout, and I think that's what really kept me going. King's Folly was super long; over 500 pages in about a 6x9 format, and the font size is probably 10 pt. at least. Just think Wheel of Time: the Great Hunt long, and you'll get an idea of how long this is. I think this is supposed to be a YA novel, as I think Bethany House Publishers intends to publish YA (correct me if I'm wrong), but due to the length and more mature themes, this definitely came off as adult level to me.
For some background, this is a story about a land that's falling apart due to the greediness and general immorality of its people. The story focuses on royal families, most of which are involved in sleeping around with concubines and mistresses. Normally a book with this sort of content, even though it's not explicit, would have made me set it down pretty early on. However, I have a habit of looking at the end of the story/book soon after I start reading it, where I found the Author's Note. Basically, she explains this is a story about a people slowly turning to the true God of this fantasy world, so that helped me see all the immorality and corruption, and the eventual turning to truth and godliness, in the right light.
There were a lot of characters, at least named characters, and I lost track of some at times when they reappeared after hundreds of pages of first meeting them. I'm glad the author took pains to list the major characters before the beginning of the story; I referenced it quite a bit, along with the map.
I liked the character development in this book. The main protagonist, Wilek, strains against living the way his father, a morally corrupt king, wants him to. Instead of having many concubines and such, he has one, and boy is she more questionable than she first sounds. In the beginning, Wilek considers her a friend, but she is very manipulative, so I never really saw her the way Wilek did, but that may have been intentional on the author's part; she didn't present any of the immorality as acceptable, and other characters blatantly condemned immoral behavior.
After (view spoiler), Wilek really starts to develop positively as a man and slowly starts to turn to one of the gods, (view spoiler) whose name is Arman. He is captured by a magic user, or mantic, named Charlon, who is supposed to be impregnated by him to fulfill some prophecy for her tribe and the spirit she serves; however, she's terrified of men from past traumas, and has a hard time persuading Wilek, or herself, to sleep with her. She was my least favorite POV, as she was so focused on doing this one thing that it disgusted me; good thing she's (view spoiler)
My favorite character was Trevn. He's also one of the princes, and Wilek's half-brother, as the king has several wives. Right from the beginning he sees through the corruption and immorality in his father's court, and is highly reluctant to practice having concubines and a harem and whatever. He's taught by a goodly priest who has just barely preserved the true teachings of Arman, and though Trevn didn't realize that at first, comes to look to Arman and risks his life to preserve what's called the Book of Arman. I also liked his interactions with this love interest and one of the main characters, Mielle, who I also enjoyed reading about and had good development.
There were several other characters, some of which didn't seem to be important, at least not to this story. I'm assuming they'll play a larger part in the second collection of the Kinsman Chronicles, King's Blood.
The story itself flowed pretty smooth, but I thought the last several chapters were pretty rushed. The action and plot were pushed really fast and condensed, so much so that some of the descriptions confused me and I had to reread them.
A lot of the story focused on the sexualization of characters, and while I feel the author portrayed it in the right light, it got pretty repetitive after awhile, and I became eager for more plot points and devices. It wasn't until probably the last half to the last fourth of the book that we got some really interesting action and a better look at the spirits of the world and their relation to their magic users.
I liked how much the setting played into the story. The whole land is riddled with tunnels from a huge plant called evenroot, which, when ingested, helps the mantics interact with the spirits and use “magic,” which is really the spirits interacting with things invisibly. Because of the excessive mining of this plant, among other things, the land is literally falling apart. It presents a desperate background for the characters to develop in, and really shows a hopelessness from greed and power struggles.
There's a lot more going on in this story, including a prophecy, but I won't go into all of that here. Once you understand the moral of this book, and why the author wrote what she did, it's an interesting read. I look forward to seeing where this series goes next year.
I received a free copy from Bethany House in exchange for an honest review.
View all my reviews
