Ben Saufley - Throne of the Crescent Moon

Throne of the Crescent Moon

I picked this book up a while back and put it down pretty quickly because I just couldn’t get past the constant and verbose references to God and God’s will. That’s not to say I was offended or upset in any way, I just found it really distracting. I’m not a religious person, so that may be part of it, and though English has its own set of curses and invocations – “oh my God,” “God willing,” etc, these were long sentences, sometimes paragraphs, with very little to do with the actual conversation. I wondered if they were translations of common Muslim utterances? This is of course a fictional world, but it appears to be built around something like Islam the same way much Anglo/Western fantasy is built around Arthurian and therefore Christian myth.

Anyway. I picked it up on Audible more recently, and that made it easier for me to elide these distracting tangents. It became more of a seasoning to the book rather than a heavy-handed and constant thing. At that point, I shot through the rest of the book.

In animation, they teach you to create unique and identifiable silhouettes for every character, and I felt like this book had the literary version of that: each character was unique, built on archetypes but a bit deeper, and each contributed something unique to the adventure and to the story. In my head, they also had literally unique silhouettes – the large, bearded ghul hunter, the stiff and skilled swordsman, the small feral (literally and figuratively) girl, etc.

I found myself wondering how it would all wrap up, which you don’t always do in genre books like this, and at the same time I definitely enjoyed the ride – the spells, the settings, the characters. I’ll definitely end up picking up the next one.