June Book Reviews: The Warden by Daniel M Ford
Picked this one up because tor publishing emailed me directly about it (so nice of them). After graduating wizard school with honors and three different specialties, Aelis expected to be assigned a cushy post in the city. Instead. she's sent to a village in the middle of nowhere, full of sheep instead of necromantic horrors to battle. But as Aelis soon learns, there may be more dangers in this sleepy hamlet than she was expecting...
This was very much one of those books where the worldbuilding is cribbed from dungeons and dragons. I was not surprised to see in the author bio that he actively plays. Personally, I think this is a bit sloppy (spoiler alert: at the end of the book, we learn that the next book is probably going to be spent doing literal dungeon delving. Talk about cliche.) However, it does lead for some fun character moments-- Aelis majored in necromancy and can't cast fireball, the sort of impressive spell everyone stereotypically expects her to do, and there's a running bit where she complains that fireball is overrated and unsubtle.
Aelis herself is very spoilt, entitled, and prickly, which is a bit of an acquired taste. Very much rich girl honors student who cruised through university on the strength of being good at school and who's now stuck with an assignment she thinks is below her. She thinks that the villagers hate her, but to my mind they're naturally behaving cautiously and a bit cold to a dangerous stranger-- not hardly the hostility that her antics fairly earn. Luckily, by the end of the book, this attitude is mostly smacked out of her, which is excellent news for the next book in the series.
Cmon, lesbian necromancer in a sheep village, what's not to like. A pulpy romp for fans of dungeons and dragons who aren't too picky about original worldbuilding. I had a lot of fun reading this one, and it's a shame it seems to be flying a bit under the radar.
