Title: Frostborn: The Gray Knight
Author: Jonathan Moeller
Published by: Azure Flame Media
Publication date: Aug 7th, 2013
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 324 (Kobo)
Format: Kobo
Source: Kobo Bookstore
Buy the Book: Amazon
Buy the Book: Kobo
On paper, this books sounds like it is going to be amazing! It has a really interesting idea behind it. A whole world inspired by Athurian Legend moves from the plane of existence as we know it through a portal into another – more fantasy based world, with magic, fantasy creatures and all the usual trash that you expect from fantasy novels! Including an entity of evil that no one knows all that much about.
If you can’t tell by my tone of writing that paragraph, the book was actually absolute trash! It read like I was being taken on the most average DnD campaign ever, with characters that had little to no personality to them! The main character, one Ridmark Arban (who I can only imagine was a cross-class character of a Warrior and Monk) a Swordbearer who had been branded a coward by his former order and booted out and banned from using a bladed weapon (So uses a staff instead, hence the cross class thoughts) is so totally unrelateable because he never misses a beat. Everything he does is pretty much amazing and he never puts a foot wrong – other than having this overly cliche tragic past like pretty much every other fantasy anti-hero ever. So never once was I concerned for his safety.
Then we have the heroine, who was so ‘memorable’ that I had to look up her name again. Calliande, a woman who starts out as a femme fatate, cause she has woken up somewhere strange with all her memories gone – who turns out to be some sort of bad ass mage (Or Magistria as they’re called in this book.) Sorry about spoilers, I’m just assuming that no one is actually going to read the full way through this book because of how bad it reads! She’s given a dagger as a weapon and pretty much spends her whole story lamenting her lost memory and finding little snippets here and there – which would be interesting if it wasn’t so tediously boring.
There are a couple of other characters, a Dwarven Cleric and and Orc warrior. Kharlact, the orc, was the only thing that kept the book relatively interesting, but I think that is more because of my bias towards orcs than through anything to really get my teeth into.
For a nemesis the group are given, orcs, undead and kobolds – just the usual fantasy baddies really – and a more mysterious being called the Shadowbearer. Which actually got pretty confusing when considering Ridmarks original order being the Swordbearers. There is also the mildly tempting hook of the looming ‘Frostborn’ but there isn’t any real substance to what we’re told to make them overly interesting. Maybe if the main character was one I gave two hoots about I’d be more interested in his blight and how the Frostborn tie into it all, but seeing as Ridmark could deal with anything thrown at him with ease, I find myself failing to really worry to much.
Though, this wasn’t even the most frustrating aspects of the novel! The repetition of sentences used, especially in fight scenes, was particularly irritating. I’m sure I read about Ridmark ‘turning his staff and smashing bones’ more times that I can actually count or even bare to remember.
I like to put something good about a book in my reviews, but honestly this book really held little for me. Everything was either repetitive, cliches or just down right dull!
Sorry, but I think I’ll be passing on any of the further 11 instalments in this series.
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