My native language is not English and I do not have spelling correction on this device so excuse my ironic mistakes.

Anyways, this book is badly written
full of litteral, unimaginative or just plain weird annalogies and adjetives.

“..two places across divided distances..”

Really? That is a double redundancy. 1. two places. 2. divided. 3. Distances. Make a choice already and simplify your phrasing! This is just annoying.

“.expression as stirn as a battlefield ghost..”

What is that?! That does not mean anything.. The idea of an annalogy is to link a certain image, feeling or event to something we recognise as similar, expanding the image and colloring it. The analogy fails when the annalog is unclear and less familiar then what it refferes to.

Odd and double phrasing. Not just repeating the same word within two or three sentences but often even in the same sentence. That is ugly and breaks flow. I can understand being a nub author but then get better proofreaders or a professional editor so these weird quirks get edited out.

On top of that the story is extremely slow to develop. Sure establish an atmosphere and anchor your characters but can you please not bore me to death doing it? Man.. my ears were bleeding after the first 4 chapters. Soppy emo babbling about the wonder of children playing. Throw in an event or two already, it is not that hard.

It did pick up a bit after that, but still slow as fok and so filled with dry explanations of the magic system that I needed to delve deep into my inner nerd to stay interested. The parallels with real life and different philosophical and esotheric perspectives that I happen to share, saved the magic system from sinking into irrelevant background prattle, but it read like a college math book.

Conclusion.
Sub par at best. Doable at a fifty percent discount but as such I will return it so I can buy number two in the series to see if these two writers learned anything from this experience. If not, refund and repeat.

Note: Dakota Krout’s other two solo series are waay better so perhaps it is all on the other guy.