Customer Reviews

The Warded Man

5 star:		(96)
4 star:		(45)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(19)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

Not since Mistborn have I been so captivated by a story and charmed by its setting. The Warded Man is an impressive debut and probably my favorite book of 2009 in any genre. If Peter Brett continues to write this way, he will need to clear space on his mantle for awards.

The Warded Man is about Arlen, a villager who must survive in a grim fantasy world ravaged by demons at night. His character arc propels the narrative once he realizes that survival is not enough. Two other characters eventually join him in his exploits against the demons: Rojer and Leesha. I like how they are regular people--too many fantasies deal with long-lost princes, wizards, queens, and knights. The best thing I can say about the three main characters is that I cared about them. Since the author takes his time developing them from children to adults, you almos feel like you are growing up alongside them. When they suffer, you will cringe, but when they excel, you will cheer.

The author's depiction of village age is authentic and folksy. Everything feels right--the gossip, the neighborliness, the barter, the sense of feeling apart from the other villages and cities. The world is dangerous, and not everyone gets along, but people set aside their differences when the demons strike. Later in the novel, the author describes city life just as well as village life, especially once Arlen reaches Krasia, a hub of a warrior society with Arabic influences.

The novel packs action, adventure, romance, and substance. I like how it considers the nature of heroism, the futility of passivity, and even the plight of women. The scenes of combat between man and demon are gratifying, and the one romantic scene is heady with tenderness and passion. The author has a pleasing, crisp, lively style that serves the story and does not overwhelm it.

Like many fantasies, The Warded Man ends with a teaser for the next book. For once, I am glad that a book does not end conclusively. I am counting days until Brett's next book. If you only read one fantasy in 2009, The Warded Man is the one to read.

Brett's debut novel is well-told, action-packed, and as addictive as any book I've ever picked up. The main characters are introduced to us in separate vignettes detailing the momentous turning points in their youths that spur them to become the heroes they will later prove to be. In the world created by Peter Brett humans fear the night, and seek protection from the demons that rise from the ground at sunset to wreak havok (which mostly involves eating human flesh).

The storytelling and snippets of humor keep the narrative lively and fresh, and while Brett's main character turns out to be rather humorless, the other people in the story are more than colorful enough to make up for that failing.

This book has similiarities to Elantris (the wards of power) by Brandon Sanderson, Mystborn (creatures arise by night) also by Sanderson, Robert Jordan's earliest books of the Wheel of Time, and a speck of George R.R. Martin. There is more humor in Brett's novels than those of the other authors, and the action is taut and frantic.

If you enjoyed any of those authors' books, or the writing of Patrick Rothfuss, you're going to love The Warded Man.

The Warded man is another hero's journey of a boy who is thrust from the womb of his home and into the terrible reality he lives. This novel follows Arlen, Leesha, and Rojer, each following similar coming-of-age arcs, jumping years, until they finally converge near the end of the book. Structure is good, but you must stray from it to keep things interesting. The story almost turns into Dune while Arlen is in the desert, but thankfully Brett decided to stop there, and instead give Arlen a Edmund Dantes-esque return as the titular Warded Man. There are some funny bits, some sweet revelations of the good in the hearts of some lowly characters and the action was often bloody and thrilling, but overall the inner story of the characters was flimsy, and Arlen essentially becomes the Batman of his world.

Brett's prose would have gotten me flayed in school, he almost entirely tells instead of shows, often repeating the obvious multiple times in the same paragraph, then having the dialog repeat it again, never allowing for subtext. He bashes the reader over the head with the apparent, yet neglects details like describing what the demons actually look like until quite a few chapters after they appear. The world that he created feels more like a rough sketch, which would work with a cast of strong and complex characters, but those are missing here.

Another odd and bothersome aspect of this book is the constant examples of rape, incest, and molestation that permeate the story. About every other chapter has the characters in some conflict with sexual predators, or their own juvenile sexual issues. Particularly Leesha, who in the story is so beautiful that she turns any man alone with her into a drooling rapist. Well written, this may have lent itself to the complexity of the story, but it was not well done. This aspect was clumsy, predicable, and left me cringing more than once, and actually less interested in the character's fates. By the end, it felt like a heavy handed attempt to shape Leesha's and the others characters, but failed to do so.

Certainly not the worst fantasy you could pick up, but if you want a well done, gritty, fantasy, check out Joe Abercrombie and the First Law series. Or just a great, original fantasy book, try The Name of Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and see how it's done.

I read 235 pages into this book in one sitting before putting it down. I might finish it, but at this point reading has become a chore. The book had an interesting premise, and after all the good reviews on here I figured I'd give it a shot, but right from the start I could tell it wasn't going to be anything special. Brett's prose (more specifically, lack therof) leaves much to be desired, and his characters are one and all very flat. I got through Arlen's first few chapters and said to myself "Well, it could be worse..." and then I met Leesha and all hopes of the book being redeemed by plot were sadly crushed.

Frankly, Brett's handling of female characters and sexuality is just too off-putting to easily continue with the book. If you like believeable characters over plot, this book definitely isn't for you.

I give the story a 4. I give the ebook version a 1. The story was excellent. I greatly enjoyed it. However, I wanted to make a note for fellow Kindle owners.

Some of the formatting in this is distracting. Each time the author meant to use "we're" the Kindle version prints out "we've". Each time the author meant to use "you're" the Kindle version prints out "you've". There are also a lot of unnecessary hyphenation at the oddest of times and places. It is obvious the publisher didn't spend a lot of time proofing the ebook version, and it needs a clean-up as these constant mistakes make for difficult immersion in what is a very good bit of story-telling.

With so many reviews typed up, I'm not sure that mine will be even read - and I normally don't write reviews at all, but this book was something else. I loved it for the first 2/3's of the book, and like other readers I wanted to give it a 5 star up to that point and I was probably driving my family crazy by talking about it too.

Pro's
- I love how the book was put together for the most part. There are three very different main characters that the author shares with the readers. And we get to see how they all grow up and how they develop.
- The writing style was really neat. Brett brought in so many different cultures, ideas, topics and perspectives with enough detail that readers could appreciate and understand them all, but not too much detail that readers got lost in the background.
- The plot (for the first 2/3's) was AMAZING!

Con's
- The last 1/3 of the the book - the characters that the author had spent most of the book developing did a 90 degree flip if not a 180. You didn't recognize the characters that you grew to love
- Almost every scene where there was a woman, sex or child bearing was the topic of conversation. Brett made it seem like a woman's only interest/purpose was creating babies or making men happy. I totally get why (in a world where human population is decreasing, you want to have more children) but, really, there is no point in kicking a dead horse.
- Leesha - one of the main characters. (SPOILER) She really emphasized the above point and I don't like how she "saved" herself for 27 years, then completely falls in love the another character, and gives herself to him, at the end of the story after having met him for all of 1 week. Her character was honestly really unrealistic. At the beginning of the story she was bearable, but in the last 1/3 I read through her portions as fast as possible.

As you can see from the lengths of the pro's and con's, sadly, I could not give this book that 5 stars that the first part deserves. I would recommend it if you need a change of story, b/c it really is an intriguing idea. But I just want you to take this note as a warning about the last part of the story.

When I started reading the Warded Man, I was truly enthralled. I could not stop reading it! Sure the vocabulary wasn't all that extensive, but the plot was intriguing. The thing that kept me from finishing it, though, was that sex and sexuality became such a major theme in the book that I was no longer comfortable reading it. There were so many references to "between the legs", "budding breasts", "flowering", graphic sex scenes, etc. and Brett painted so many of the characters as lusty adulterers that I just couldn't continue reading it.

I really enjoyed the Warded Man; definitely a good start to a series that I will continue to look forward to. I think it's worth a solid 4 stars, not the most amazing or original fantasy I've ever read, but it certainly kept me fascinated and entertained throughout its length. There's such a definition of character traits in the novel that it lacks a certain depth achieved by other authors. In this world, you're either a coward or a fighter, good or evil, knowledgeable or ignorant. There's no room for the shades of gray that one would find in more realistic writing styles. But still very interesting nonetheless. And certainly the fact that we watch the main characters grow from children into adults is a very strong foundation for the audience to understand their personalities and motivations as the series continues. It was an original move for Brett to start the story with Arlen, Leesha and Rojer at such young ages and I think it will pay off well for him in the end in terms of character development.

I agree that the romantic chemistry between Arlen and Leesha felt very forced and I don't think he should've tried to push them together as early as he did. But I did enjoy the 3 main characters chemistry with each other overall, I felt like they were a good match for each other and will make good companions as time goes on.

One huge warning I have: I bought this book on the Kindle and was highly, HIGHLY disappointed with its formatting. It was missing capitalization and punctuation, paragraph separation-- basically anything you can think of that could be wrong with the format, was wrong. It made for a horrible read, and even though I prefer my Kindle books to trekking to the bookstore, I would recommend not wasting your money for the Kindle version. It's incredibly distracting and hard to read. And the formatting never gets better, but stays awful throughout the book.

After 300-plus pages of suffering, I've finally decided to call it quits on this one. It's disappointing, because the book had such potential but fell way short of my expectations.


The first few chapters of The Warded Man do a great job capturing interest and revealing a world that readers would enjoy exploring. That's about as far as my interest lasted, and after that it was a struggle to plow through the rest.

Throughout the course of the novel (or, at least, what I've been able to read) the characters behave in truly unrealistic ways. Sure, it's a fantasy novel and there is always leeway in how people would interact with one another, but I'm not sure I'd buy some of the stuff that happens. There are too many examples to list, but suffice it to say that my most frequent reaction to some of the dialogue/responses/character interactions was a groan and a shake of the head. Not to mention that Brett handles sexuality with the delicacy of a Tyrannosaurus fighting a dump truck. *Slight Spoiler* In the beginning, when a girl's father forces him to have sex with her while Arlen and Jeph just sit there in the room over I thought, "Okay, he's just showing that the world is a tough place, and that Arlen's father is a coward." But it soon becomes readily apparent that this is not the case, and that the disturbing references to such acts are there for no real reason. The characters don't act or react to them, they just happen. Not to mention, it seems that Leesha exists for the sole purpose of making lewd sexual references and having people fight over who gets to rape her first (almost literally). There's probably a way to handle such a situation to lend it meaning and have it impact the story, but it doesn't happen here.

Characters are mostly one-dimensional, with a few semi-interesting (but unimportant) ones along the way.

Also, the book is really just plain old boring. Nothing happens. Oh, sure, the demons come and hit the wards every night, but that's never "exciting". And the demon that haunts Arlen for years and years is dealt with in a heartbeat, once again robbing that whole arc of any significance. I'm sure it picks up toward the end, but it should be interesting enough to get me to the end first, no? Many of the subplots that I felt merited a little more time were ended abruptly or left out to dry. To be fair, the subplots may have been wrapped up in the end that I never quite got to, but it seems like with every jump to a new section, the threads are snipped rather than woven into the rest of the story.

Which leads me (quite handily) to the discussion of structure. The structure of the book is, in my completely unprofessional opinion, poorly handled. I don't mind reading a story that covers 10 years, but I do NOT think that 10 years can be covered in 300 pages worth of material. So much of the character growth (which, I believe, is the ENTIRE POINT OF A NOVEL STARRING AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD BOY) is lost between the chapters as the story rushes forward. For instance, we get one chapter from Rojer when he is three years old... then another when he is ten, a few hundred pages later. Great. Arlen goes from an eleven year old country bumpkin to (I believe) an 18 year old in 300 pages. Leesha goes from 13 to 20. Every mini-scene (1-2 pages) feels rushed, and a chapter is comprised of about five or six mini-scenes that take you through either a night or a week or a month or a year, depending. There's little to no consistency, and the viewpoints change even within chapters.

Speaking of viewpoints changing, the book is also riddled with weakly written scenes in which--you guessed it--the viewpoint changes from one sentence to another. The viewpoint never outright switches (it's more of a leak than a flood), but it gave me pause more than enough times to recognize what was happening. Some people enjoy this particular narrative style, but to me this is not indicative of a strong writer. We should not be privy to Arlen's thoughts, and then a sentence later have the "feelings" of another explained to us. There is no way to find yourself submersed in Arlen's mind, or the mind of the other viewpoint characters, because the thoughts/feelings of others manage to slip their way in. Not only does it take away a lot of the "connection" I like to feel with any character, but it is a minor violation of the viewpoint, and a major violation of the old standard "show, don't tell." Telling is frequently necessary, but quite often simply seeing the characters act or react is enough to get a glimpse of their mind.

So, we have a book with (as far as I can tell) little action, uninteresting characters, writing that is not very gripping, a weak narrative style, and immature sexuality/character interaction. That about sums up my feelings.

That said, there are plenty of people who enjoyed the novel. What floats my boat may sink yours, so if you're on the fence you might as well give it a shot. Who knows, you might find the things I feel are faults to be genius.

The Warded Man, originally titled The Painted Man, is the first book in a set of three. The book centers around three main characters who we follow from a young age as they grow up in a world where demons, known as corelings, surface from the earth every night when the sun sets. The only protection people have against the corelings are magical runes, known as wards, that can be drawn or inscribed around their homes or settlements.

The story begins with Arlen, a young boy who lives in a village with his parents. His family is attacked one night by demons and Arlen fights them, something very few people are willing to do. Arlen isn't your typical hero of a fantasy book though. He doesn't have magical powers or some ancient prophecy that tells of his destiny. He's just a boy who grows up to become a man and ultimately show others how to face their fears.

The second character is Leesha, a young girl who lives with her hateful, abusive mother and subdued father in a separate village from Arlen. She's been promised to marry a young man and is eager to do so until he spreads rumors about her that destroys her good name. Leesha soon finds herself under the wing of a herb gatherer that trains her in caring for the sick. Leesha has to overcome not only her fear of the corelings, but also her fear of an overbearing and ruthless mother as well.

The third main character is Rojer, a young boy who has a deformed hand, caused by an encounter with the corelings who killed his family when he was an infant. Rojer is a jongleur, sort of like a jester, that travels with messengers from village to village during the day. While he does many tricks, Rojer's specialty is playing the fiddle. It's a gift that proves very valuable over the course of the book and helps him through the trials he faces.

Fear is a theme throughout the book and one that the author, Peter V Brett, discussed in his interviews. He wanted to write a book about fear, what it does to people, and how they react to it. The Warded Man achieves those goals brilliantly. Peter Brett puts forth a story full of suspense, action and great characters that makes the reader eager to turn the page. Definitely one of my favorites and very impressive work from a first time author.