In Solitude's Shadow

Empire of Ruin, Book One

By: David Green, Eerie River Publishing

Narrated by: Ashley Griffin

The tides of fate are shifting.

The banished have returned, and they have set their eyes on the walls of solitude. Zanna Alpenwood, a powerful mage, and 200 aged and forgotten sparkers are all that stand between the banished and the nation of Haltveldt.

With time running out, Zanna is forced to reach out to her estranged daughter, Calene, and set her on an impossible quest. In doing so, Calene must decide between her masters and her own conscience as she teams up with unlikely allies to forge their way over land and sea. Will they arrive in time to save the fortress of solitude from destruction?

Only one thing is certain. Ruin is assured if solitude falls.

©2021 Eerie River Publishing (P)2022 Eerie River Publishing

Great Characters and Interesting Plot

Characters:
This was for sure the highlight of the story for me. The mother daughter duel PoV was excellent. I love the layers as we went further and the why their relationship is the way that it is, and how that all plays out. There is a strength to each of these women that is beyond “physical” and I think a lot male authors should pull out their pens and take note here. other than that, I loved the Zanna’s approach to the whole of the situation; extremely believable.
5/5
Story:
Plot was solid, well paced, and thought out. I found myself able to follow everything without getting lost or jumbled about. There was a single instance of timing that I would loved to have seen be a little tighter that had to do with an unwanted swim… but other than that, I loved it!
4/5
Narration:
So, the narrator was amazing. Her character work and emotions really brought everything to life. That being said, there were some audio shifts in the quality here and there, not bad enough to take me out of the story, but noticeable, like, “that was odd….o well”. Overall, Ashley gets a 5/5, but quality a 4/5.
Overall:
I feel like it would be disrespectful to give this less than a 5/5. It was tight, well-paced, engaging, and memorable. We didn’t go through 50 magic systems or have to memorize 10,000 names of things and places. My “4/5” were my own, and probably just my over-analytical brain.
5/5
Well done, great David, rest easy knowing you have a masterful work!

Intense

The story begins at the end of a battle with a magical race who's thirst for violence can never be satiated. After seemingly defeating one enemy they turn on their allies the elves. When the elves are nearly defeated they show signs they'll turn on themselves.
Mix in heavy topics including prejudice, and addiction, there's no letting up with the grim intensity in the story. I could only listen in small doses which makes me think I may not have been the ideal audience.
There are some fantastically gruesome scenes that are described incredibly and I think would make a good action movie. The shadow sparker being crushed by a horse will surely haunt my daydreams.
I listen through earbuds the narrator keeps the level of intensity throughout the entire narration but the room she recorded in sounds a bit hollow.
I was given a copy of this audiobook for free and this is my honest review.

An Excellent Start to the Series!

The story moves at a pretty steady pace. I was constantly engaged by the action, and even the lulls were interesting. Green spends a lot of time building background to the world, but it didn’t feel tedious. I will admit that it read a little more like a prequel in some places, but that’s about all I can come up with for criticism and I don’t even know that this is necessarily a bad thing. It is the first book in the series so I suppose it is serving entirely to set up the series.

A lurking danger, a group of people called The Banished, appear to be making a reappearance in the remote, weakly guarded north. This brought to mind the understaffed Black Watch guarding the Wall as the host of Wilding’s attack. Meanwhile the rest of the Kingdom is busy committing genocide against the elves. This story features themes of tolerance in the midst of intolerance, as well as redemption and restoration. A broken relationship between a mother and a daughter, a regretful father who sent his child north to hide his mixed heritage, and restraint in the midst of suspicion. There’s something every reader can identify with on some level, which is why I think this story resonates with a lot of readers. Green finds modern topics and brings them to life within the exploratory sanctuary of the mind.

This is epic fantasy, so of course there’s magic. I would characterize the magic system as generally soft, with interesting nuances that I suspect will continue to expand as the series grows. We only catch a glimpse of what the Banished are capable of, but they appear to have retained some old tricks from before they were defeated thousands of years earlier.
Green did a great job in creating a compelling story that wraps up just one stage of the growing conflict. Readers will no doubt move right into the second book in the series to find out what happens next.

My only other qualm only applies to the audiobook only and that is the audio quality is not, in my opinion, professional grade. Ashley Griffin's narration itself was great and her voice is certainly audible. However, if listening with the volume all the way up, like from a phone, the background static is distinctly there. It’s not terrible, but it’s not supposed to be there and it can be a little distracting each time you begin listening until you become used to it. There were a few times when then the quality shifted between chapters as well. I recalled a transition to chapter 11 (I think) when the background noise noticeably increased. This all said, this issue didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story overall. I suspect this narrator didn’t have the right equipment or didn’t know how to adjust the recording settings, or mix it afterwards to remove this sound. All in all, it’s a noticeable but minor issue. If you’re an audio person, this is not significant enough of an problem to avoid listening to this book, which is a great story. Do not confuse quality of writing, with the quality of the recording.

Not what I expected

I listened to this book, and it is totally not what I expected going in, although, I’m not certain what I did expect. It has all the things that epic fantasy should have: multiple races, war, a journey, and characters with deep and interwoven backstories. However, I really struggled to connect with the book for the first 5 hours of the 6h 18m-long book.

The perspective was really distant (farther away from the main characters than I prefer), and that made it hard for me to connect with Calene or Zara until the last 1/5 of the book. It felt more focused on all the things going on in the world rather than the connection with mother/daughter.

I have the same struggles when trying to get into Brandon Sanderson’s books, so I’m probably in the very small minority here. Perhaps listening wasn’t the best way to read this book.

Oh, and by the way, can we please minimize the substitute word for the f-bomb? Perhaps in reading with eyeballs it isn’t annoying, but in audio form, it was super annoying.

In the end, the way it came together brought my rating up quite a bit. And yes, that ending hits you right square in the gut.