Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Garden of Stones (Echoes of Empire Book 1)

Top positive review

One person found this helpful

Wow!

ByAmazon Customeron July 12, 2016

I'll say it again: Wow!

Not for the faint of heart. This is a dificult reading. You need to be able to abstract a little since Mark T. Barnes won't handle you the basic information about how some things in this fantastic world works. But at the end you will be able to understand most of it.

This world is fantastic. Really fantastic. There is a very cool magic system in place. There are complex politcs that feels like a fast-paced Game of Thrones. There are lots of actions. There are memorable characters. There are promisses for yet more for the future. There are lots of secrets from the past.

Even better: There is no stupid boy forced to leave his village (near the end of the world) that must journey through the world in order to become a great warrior/sorcerer/hero

Definitely one of the best books I've read

Top critical review

See all 49 critical reviews›

6 people found this helpful

Really big and really complicated world....but enjoyable if you stick with it

ByJason Baisdenon October 9, 2015

This was a tough, tough book to get into. I listened via the audible narration and the narrator is really terrific. Even so, it was probably 4-6 hours into it before I felt like I could wrap my head around the character names, general ideas of who they are, and physical characteristics. Things like the Lion Guard....that really is a group of Lion people with human level intelligence.

I agree with other reviewers that the world is needlessly complicated. It does seem like the author took a ton of video game and anime character types and stuck them in the world together. And, I also agree that the author did needlessly take things we have in real life, put them in his world, and just give them a new name.

My main criticism of this book is the villain: Corajidin. The author goes to great lengths to try to humanize his actions and motivations and display a man in true turmoil. I think he only half way succeeds. The issue I take with the character is that he's simply not a believable person to follow; that is, I don't see any compelling reason why anyone followed him. Yes, the author says they're opportunists, but that only goes so far. This character is literally weak at the beginning of the book and goes downhill from there.

Now, I've criticized a lot of things here. I will say that I disagree with others that say the characters aren't well portrayed. The cast is quite vast, but I had a really good idea of the sort of person each of them were by the books end. None of them seemed one dimensional (except, maybe, Corajidin). The books really strong upside is that the audible narratior is Nick Podehl, the same actor that narrated Patrick Rothfuss' works, which is pretty damn huge.

I also really like the magic system, though, Indris would laugh at me calling it magic. The idea is that, through a combination of reason and logic, characters can do...well, heck, it's magic alright. It just is. And it's pretty cool without being too overwhelming. The author doesn't have the characters use magic as the fix all solution to things either.

With all of this said, I think I'll head into book two to see where things go from here. There are a lot of questions I don't have answers to.

My advice: go for the audible, but buy the kindle version and then the audible upgrade. It's like $7 all said, which is really reasonable for an audio book.

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Showing 21-30 of 64 reviews(Verified Purchases). See all 134 reviews

One of my new favorites!

ByGalen Coleson March 5, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Admittedly, I agree with some others that when you first start out, everything is a bit jarring because of the heavy use of terms/language within the world the author has created. Regardless, what kept me so interested (aside from a quick reference to the glossary ptovided in the back now and then) was the wonderful attention to detail. There were so many aspects of the world that just made this book (and the next two) deep and rich. I wish there were more in the series as there were some excellent elements pertaining to the main characters past which I would love to read more about. I would Highly recommend this book to the fantasy reader who's interested in a book which is deeper and more real than your average sword and sorcery. Sometimes humorous sometime horrifying, this is a trilogy I'll read again.