Customer Reviews

The Nations of the Night (The Lightbringer Trilogy, Book 2)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Oliver Johnson's The Nations of the Night seems pretty complete within itself. The heroes are all set to go off on the next phase of their adventures by the end, and while there are one or two strings left dangling to be sorted in the last volume, overall the storyline here is satisfyingly complete.

At the start of The Nations Of The Night, a party of disparate characters plainly fleeing a considerable catastrophe find themselves suddenly transported to a cave in mountains conveniently distant from their original enemies. However, Fate being the vicious dog she is, they are soon beset by a new set of foes to keep them busy. They must flee the snowstorms of deadly winter, controlled by the Fenris wolf, to seek the hidden land of Lorn. To make matters worse, their surviving enemies from volume one have found their own means of rapid transit, and are close on the heroes' heels.

Oliver Johnson writes with practised facility, and if his characters are not hugely original, they at least do have a certain presence on the page. He plots well, and engaged this reader's attention pretty solidly with his action setpieces. If there is one major fault, it is that there is a difficulty of scale in this book. Journeys which take long days of hard slog at one point get traversed in a single day later on. Mountains high enough to have characters climbing them gasping in the thin air seem somehow compacted at other times.

There are just some odd mistakes in this one, or poor judgment (don't know which). They've just spent a good deal of time running from murderous hordes, and at the end when they're about to be overtaken, they take the time to chat with Urthred's newfound father and nothing acts like this is weird. Also, when Thalassa is about to die from the vampire bite, Urthred washes his face in this silver chalice that's supposed to cure her before he offers any to her. There was some comment about her needing to "drink the blood of a pure man" to be cured, and that seems to have been totally forgotten by the author closer to the end (unless the leeches count, but you would have thought that they would have made a bigger deal about it if that were the case). And finally, he seems to be gearing up for a "good needs evil, evil needs good" type ending, yet the guy that was supposed to have written the books on the good god and bad god has three magical artifacts, all of which are inimical to the evil god (I thought the rod of shadows might be theirs, but Faran explicitly talks about how he needs to destroy it cause the evil God doesn't like it). There's this map in the book that looks like it would take days to travel what they go through in only hours. The way they rest or eat in the book it completely skipped over, and the villagers disappear from the troop after they find Lorn, and no one cares (why makes us care about the little girl at all then?)

The above words describe it best: contrived and boring. Also cliched and with recycled themes that further bog this unimaginative drivel If it were possible I would give this [book] negative stars.