Official Review: Rituals by Ryan Hastings: Storm and Serp...
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- Poppy Drear
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Official Review: Rituals by Ryan Hastings: Storm and Serp...
The world of Rituals: Storm and Serpent by Ryan Hastings is a diverse one, with angels, demons, celestial beings, cat people, trolls, and more all vying for dominance in a fantasy realm. In this complex setting, though, a tried-and-true conflict plays out: a good vs. evil showdown on the scale of several continents. A grand fantasy epic like this can easily spiral out of control if not treated carefully. Unfortunately, this book doesn't quite avoid that fatal flaw.
For one thing, there's a multitude of magical powersets, including wrathsingers, bloodlions, voidkeepers, summoners, necromancers, cogs, and more. Most of them aren't really fleshed out or explored, partly due to the sheer volume of characters readers are expected to keep up with, and I often found myself needing to take notes to keep track of all of them. Individually, every character and powerset has interesting elements, but I found myself wishing the narrative would just focus on a single scene long enough to develop them a bit more.
By far, the book's most crucial problem is that it tries to show readers what's happening at any given time to far too many characters at once. To make matters worse, there aren't paragraph breaks every time a new character speaks, making it even harder to keep track of what's going on. The narrator doesn't really help, here, either - he's an omniscient storyteller who keeps inserting personal commentary that just detracts from the experience. It's hard to be invested in a grand battle when the narrative butts in with "Glorious!" or "Hahaha!" every few pages.
With all that said, I think this book is still really impressive on a few counts. While the circumstances leading up to each battle were hard to follow, each battle individually was vibrant and creative, making good use of varied fighting styles on both sides. I also loved some of the characters' concepts, though I wasn't able to empathize with them as much as I would've liked; the angel who chose to live among mortals and the thunder troll thrust into a leadership position were both particularly interesting to me.
Ultimately, this book feels like eight or nine very interesting stories all packed together, giving each other no room to breathe. It's very creative, but there's so much going on that the overall experience is just overwhelming. I rate it 2 out of 4 stars, and I'd tentatively recommend it to fantasy fans who like the genre more for the outlandish magic and epic battles than the stories and characters. It's also worth mentioning that the book has quite a few grammatical errors.
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Rituals by Ryan Hastings: Storm and Serpent
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- CnderAngel
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Thanks for the honest review
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That's a common issue with overly complex stories. Often times, when there are a lot of characters and plots, it is easy to lose track of them. Characters and their background need to be introduced slowly, in harmonic ways that help to build the story instead of making it seem that the author is throwing information at us just for the sake of it, without purpose whatsoever. That requires quite a bit of skill, and a good edition. I agree here. Perhaps another round of edition that makes the text easier-to-read in general, could help to make it clear and more enjoyable.NetMassimo wrote: ↑10 Apr 2020, 09:55 This seems a case of a novel with a great potential in need of an editor to help the author in its development. Readability is an issue, and probably splitting the text in paragraphs where needed would help. Thank you for your informative review!
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Thank you for the honest review.