The Shadow Of What Was Lost

This book was a chore to get through. I usually don't feel like writing public book reviews (I have a reading journal for that), but for some reason I want to write about my love-hate relationship with this one. And what better place to do that than my neglected blog (no, Goodreads wasn't an option, I hate it there).

At first I was hooked with this book, though it starts out as yet another chosen one classic Fantasy book with our male protagonist Davian who is a whopping 16 years old and lives at a magic school. I forgot about his age most of the time and imagined a much older guy, like early 20s, but nope. They're basically all teenagers. I don't want to retell the whole story here for spoiler reasons (and also I'd be still sitting here hours later because it's a 700-800 pages long book, depending on the version you read. My ebook had 800 pages) but he struggles with his magic power, gets send on his heroes' journey where he's accompanied by his best friend SamWirr (what a great name). They meander around the continent for a while, travelling to different places, meeting new kinda irrelevant NPCs for their party (Aelric and Dezia are... just there for the XP?), things happen, people die but also don't die, yada yada. Classic.

The more fun part of the story is our only female character (that isn't a female shaped cardboard cutout) named Ashalia and her story arc is the most interesting in the book, albeit a very convenient one as she gets placed by the narration right where she should be. I mean of course the narration places characters, but this was a case of "the author wanted it, so he wrote it that way". And it shows ever so painfully for her story arc. She gets send around by others like a ping pong ball and just agrees to anything because even after she suffered some significant trauma, she trusts everyone from the get go. Come on now!
I'm just glad she didn't get the "female character gets sexually assaulted for character development" treatment as I was dreading it (but getting forcefully stripped off your magic powers is close enough, I guess). Still, there's no rape or anything sexual in this book, thank you very much!

My main problem with the book is that every single character doesn't feel like a person at all. I had troubles telling them apart from each other, they are all bland like German food and on top of that, a few of them go under different names. There are SO MANY names, it gets really confusing after a while and as they all read and sound the same, I sometimes struggled with who was who.
It would have helped greatly if the characters had own, distinct voices or a rich inner life. None of them feel human and they're there to get the story going and mostly you just don't care about them at all because you don't have any connection to them whatsoever.
I didn't really care when Ashalia got assaulted and abducted at one point and not even Wirr cared much when his bestest and only friend got lost in a cursed ghost city. I've read sci-fi books that had characters solely as plot devices so I get it, but damn were they bland and interchangeable. It would have also been great to have a glossary of all the characters/places but surprisingly for a tome this huge there was none. The second book thankfully has one, though.

The other problem with this book is, that it does building up lots of different story arcs. It's the first book in a trilogy, so of course it has to do quite a lot of heavy lifting plot-wise but I felt constantly on edge while reading (in the beginning I could hardly put it down because it had this huge carrot on a stick dangling over my head) and almost never got rewarded for it. It's often plot twist after plot twist on top of yet another plot twist and then time travel gets sprinkled on top for good measure. And then it's change of perspective for 100 pages, because fuck you reader! Nothing gets resolved, there's much of "let's talk when I come back" and lots of loose threads to deal with. Some parts were too short, some parts too long and it could have been a lot better when it was 200 pages shorter.

The "russian doll storytelling" can work if you don't overwhelm the reader and for some people this might work well. For me it didn't. I caught myself being quite bored and over it around 40-60% into the book and had to force myself to continue reading at around 60%, mainly because of sunk cost fallacy at this point. I'm glad I didn't toss the book because it picked up in speed at around 70% again but those were some huge and quite unbelievable plot twists that not even "Lost" had back in the days.

The thing is, I kinda want to read the second book now, too. It's even longer than the first one but I really want to know where all of this is going. On the other hand I dread continuing the series if the other books are equally as meandering as the first one.
The first book is somewhat closed in itself, there's no cliffhanger at the end, luckily. But almost nothing got resolved in a satisfying manner (who is Malshash? What's the deal with Davian and Taeris?) and the chess figures are merely being moved to different places.

On a positive note, I really like the magic system even if it's a bit flawed. There's a lot of subtle and not so subtle magic going on. You have The Gifted and The Augurs who are 2 very different kinds of magicians with very distinct skill sets and there's an evil overlord wizard somewhere in the background. Very classic fantasy, like I said.
Is it enough to read any further? I don't know yet. I want to but I also don't. I finished it yesterday and I'm still thinking about it, so it can't have been that bad. But also, meh. Too long, too much meandering. Like this blog post.

So this is it. Not sure why anyone would want to read this but thank you if you did.