This was quite a climactic ending to Hodges’ Sword of Light trilogy. The stakes were pretty set by the end of the previous book, but the obstacles facing the protagonists loom even greater in this final story. Since I had read the Legends of the Gods trilogy first, I had a few spoilers, so a few twists I kind of knew were coming.
I believe this was the first trilogy Hodges wrote, so this seems to be his third book. In that perspective, he seems to have settled a little more into how he wanted the pacing of the book to proceed, and this one moves along at a pretty strong pace. Things pick up pretty quickly and don’t really relent too much.
There were quite a few loose ends Hodges needed to tie up and resolve in this book, and I think he covered his bases well (I really hate it when authors leave things unresolved), so when the final epilogue closes, the ending feels right. With that said, I think you could get away with only reading this book and not the rest of the books in the trilogy, but you’d really be missing out on some of the character development and some of the twists which were set up very early on.
David Stifel continues a solid job with the narration. He has a very masculine voice and when I first heard him I wondered how he would handle female characters, since i figured his voice would just sound weird if he tried to sound like a woman. I was surprised to learn that he doesn’t even really try, but he does tweak his voice so that each character (even female ones) have a unique voice. It actually works really well and I found myself pulled into his narration. Some reviewers have complained of the pacing of his words, but I didn’t really notice anything wrong with it (note that I tend to speed my audiobooks up a little).
All in all a fun read. Pretty solid fantasy fair and quite enjoyable. The characters were nicely complex and nuanced and all their actions flowed naturally from their characters. Consequences of actions made sense, and no characters were suddenly (and stupidly) higher powered or weaker than they had been portrayed earlier. The magic system used was pretty consistent throughout the trilogy, even if some of how it worked was a little vague. If you enjoy a good fantasy story, this should be an enjoyable read.
[Note: I received a free copy of this in exchange for an honest review.]