Full disclosure up front: This was an ARC that I won in a contest on GoodReads. This book is not released until February.
I am a HUGE fantasy nerd. The words “epic fantasy series” make me happy. When I won a contest to read what was touted as the fantasy star of 2019, I was thrilled. Then I read the inside cover where it is described as “Uniting the worldbuilding of a Brandon Sanderson with the storytelling verve of a Patrick Rothfuss”and suddenly I was hesitant. Those are big, bold words to throw out for a debut novel. IMHO, Rothfuss and Sanderson are two of our greatest living fantasy writers; setting the bar that high is really dangerous. I’m sorry to say that this book does not live up to the hype.
That is not to say this book is bad, or that I won’t read the rest of the series. The Ruin of Kings tells the story of Kihrin, a bastard orphan with a very complicated history that is unveiled both to him and to us over the course of 500+ pages. The story is told, principally, via two narrators – Talon, a mimic, and Kihrin himself, who begins as a prisoner of the former. There are also footnotes and addendums from a third character, Thurvishar, who I will not explain lest I ruin some important plot twists. Kihrin’s story begins with life after his kidnapping and enslavement, leading up to his present imprisonment. Talon’s story begins roughly 5 years previous and ends with Kihrin’s kidnapping. The interesting part of these narrative differences is that Talon has absorbed the memories of a number of other characters in the book (it’s part of her power as a mimic – I’ll leave further explanation to the book). As such, Talon’s tale is told through multiple character perspectives, whereas Kihrin’s is entirely his own. Added to this are the interesting footnotes from Thurvishar that sometimes serve as his own commentary, and sometimes are there to educate the reader about some aspect of the world. The book also contains a map, glossary, guide to noble house families, pronunciation guide, and vane family tree.
All of this sounds like it should add up to an interesting story of prophecy and history, magic and murder. To a point, it does. There are interesting threads here, and characters I eventually grew to love. The biggest issue for me was that it all took too long. It took a very long time for me to get hooked into the narrative enough to reach “read another chapter that turns into 5” territory. This is not a damnation of long books. My husband mocks me often for my love of huge fantasy tomes, once asking if my copy of Words of Radiance was actually a copy of The Bible based on its substantial weight. 500 pages is nothing to a reader of Sanderson, but this book felt significantly longer than one of his, and I think that comes down to both pacing and wanting to do too much. There is a LOT of story going on here, and I think it would have benefited from focusing on less of it for more time to really develop the characters and relationships thoroughly instead of vaulting onto the next trial. I could read a whole book of Galen and Kihrin bonding, for example. Seeing the battered son of a monstrous father finally find a friend and ally in his long-lost brother, and seeing Kihrin find a kindred that he could help make a stronger, happier person was a delight. Then again, something like the time spent with Morea, who is a catalyst for a number of things in the book, felt wasted. I was not emotionally impacted by what happened to her, and her constant effect on the story left me cold.
There’s some decent world building going on here, but I wouldn’t compare it to Sanderson’s. I’m not sure I feel that Lyon has the same fully developed sense of her world that someone like Sanderson does. It feels like she wants it to be, and maybe she knows her world inside and out and it didn’t quite come across to me as a reader, I’m not sure. The attempt is great. I love the footnotes, and the dual perspectives is a great narrative technique, even if its execution didn’t always work for me.
I’m very interested in seeing where this goes and what Lyons becomes as a writer. There is a TON of potential here for really great things, both in this story and in the author generally, and I look forward to what the future brings.
CW for the book: Slavery, murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, graphic violence