I read the John Gwynne books in February. I read them in publication order starting with The Faithful and the Fallen, and then the Of Blood and Bone trilogy, and then the Bloodsworn Saga. I had a good time, they were really quick reads.
The Faithful and the Fallen (Malice, Valor, Ruin, Wrath)
This starts out with a classic Chosen One, humble farmboy growing up etc. Feels YA at first, but it definitely grows up with the series. This time in a Viking style setting! We spend a lot of time in the village throughout the first book. We get a few POV characters, but Corban is our main guy. It’s a very small world. Basically a culture rebuilding after a cataclysmic event several hundred years ago (maybe thousands, I forget). He does a pretty good job of exploring the different lands and their cultures. The differing cultures are fairly shallow, but it didn’t bother me.
There were actually a few characters that I really liked! I generally liked the characters, but Veradis and Cywen and Maquin were standouts. I actually liked Corban quite a bit as well. Of course, I must include Storm, Corban’s wolven companion. Just a wolf the size of a horse, and a very very good girl.
I really hated at least two of the villains, so good work there. Part of the problem with drawing out the conflicts until the end is that the villains just keep doing evil acts and it feels somewhat repetitive?
The book features the development of a shield wall as their new superweapon. Gwynne writes very intimately during the shield wall scenes, and it’s incredibly compelling.
The series really worked for me in a lot of ways. The simplicity of the plot was acceptable because it was already a fairly traditional structure. I have read so many books that subvert or reject traditional fantasy tropes, so it was a nice change to read a modern tropey fantasy book that dives right in.
Not everything can be Wheel of Time. But with all these POV characters and how quickly we jump between them (some chapters are less than a page), everything felt somewhat shallow. Robert Jordan would devote an entire book to what would be a multi-chapter subplot in one of these books. So it felt like a bunch of montages of “oh and then they did this for 6 weeks so now he’s good at it”.
Minor spoilers (still vague):
Some of the misery was too miserable. And he tends to delay some of the resolutions and settlings of grudges until the big final battle. Which leaves us with pieces of shit just surviving constantly and being allowed to do more awful things. It would be nice to resolve some of the conflicts over the course of the books rather than the very end, but it definitely made the end exciting.