Top tier fantasy!

Incredible story, excellent narrator.

Could not recommended this book more.

S tier fantasy for me (up there with Sanderson, GOT, Robert Jordan, Jade War, the name of the wind)

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Powerfully Beautiful

This book was poetic. It superseded my expectations. A beautiful story of love, loss, propaganda, sexism, masculinity, abuse, grief, and wealth. I am speechless

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WHAT????

You’ll understand my review title when you listen. Really good stand alone story with some unexpected moments.

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It's going to continue... right?

I feel like this was a 3 in one deal. The first part sets up the story, Builds up the characters, the world and magic system. The second part is the "war.'' It was almost cinematic the way it was written. My goodness, Wang knows how to write a fight scene. Plot armor? Forget it, these characters go through hell and you feel it. The 3rd part is the aftermath, grief and rebuilding. It is a rollercoaster ride with these characters start to end. I loved that we got narration from 2 people. Just when I thought this was going to be a typical child prodigy protagonist who can seemingly do anything... He's not. The other narration is one of the adults who is deeply flawed and fascinating to follow. The fight scenes were so vividly written. It's not like 2 pages and the fight is over. It is the whole middle section of the book. If you like epic fight scenes that last then this is the book for you!
Issues I had with the story are minor. The pacing was a bit off in places. I think the second chapter was a long flashback thrown in just when we were getting to know Mamoru. It was a weird place for it because the flashback establishes the setting for the outside world while we are still getting to know the small secluded town Mamoru lives in. It's an important flashback but it's long. It just felt in the wrong place. The final few chapters had some jumps in it where it could have been fleshed out a bit more.

The narration. Ahh~~ Well, Andrew Tell did a great job reading this. I would definitely listen to his narration again. Amazing voice and easy to listen to. However, whoever produced this audiobook didn’t properly prepare Tell for the language issues. It’s clear Tell does not speak any of the languages in the book. It seems like he gave it his best shot but they really should have given him a coach. As someone who is familiar with Asian languages I can say it didn’t really take away from the story since the way Tell reads it is like a completely new and unrecognisable language. (I don’t know, I just had a good laugh trying to figure out what he was saying) What was said gets explained in English, so It didn’t bother me that much. Things that are repeated throughout the book though, things like Tou-sama and Nee-sama should have been properly explained to him and checked. I found myself detaching and joking that Takeru’s son calls him Two because he’s the second born and doesn't deserve the respect, and Misaki’s Brother calls her Ni-sama because she acts more like a brother than a sister.

I just read this series was discontinued... for now. Hopefully, once they have grown more as an author, Theonite will be back.

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beautiful story, not my favourite narrator

A beautiful story set in an intriguing universe. The emotional rollercoaster and character developments are superb. Unfortunately I found Andrew Tell's narration to be a bit annoying at times - overly inflected and hence in the end distracting from the emotion that it so hard tried to convey

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A simple premise executed flawlessly

Heartbreaking realism of a war story in a fun and interesting fantasy world. Dealing with the beautiful subverted expectations and the readers heartbreak really gives food for thought whilst going through this story. A simple premise executed flawlessly.

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Would be 4.5 rating if I could. Good, not Perfect.

Please Note: I try to keep my reviews spoiler free, so I'm going to analyse while trying to remain intentionally vague and objectional. If you would like to read more about pacing or intricacies like trope development, this won't help.

Firstly I'm going to clearly state that the narration of this story was an easy 5 stars. At both regular and faster speeds the pronunciation was clear and concise. I would be comfortable playing this at any speed I needed to, and the voices were impressively diverse. I would highly recommend the audiobook for this alone, but it IS awkwardly split. The main reason I would give this a 4.5 if I could is because it was just teetering between the two ratings. There are chapters that are over 90 minutes long with multiple perspectives, so it felt a little messy to not have clear stopping points in place. However, I finished this story with very little breaks so I didn't find that it impacted my enjoyment.

Additionally, there are several references to terminology that was never explained (It's easy to infer, but that's not the point), so sometimes it was frustrating since this is the first of M.L. Wang's work I have experienced. For the most part it was a true standalone, but I was always curious if I were missing those definitions from earlier novels. Otherwise, the content and plot integrity itself was flawless.

Finally, there are several scenes that some people could find distressing. I couldn't honestly say that there were parts of this story that I disliked, or that felt unnecessary for the story to unfold. Without spoilers that's all I can say. Please read other reviews if you feel like this is cause for concern, as I'm sure they will give better content warnings than I am able to.

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Just wow

Absolutely incredible story. The characters are so rich and the story, while slow, will take hold of you so completely you won’t be able to stop listening. The narrator does such wonderful justice to the story and characters too, I have never cried when listening to an audiobook as normally it feels a little removed, but this had me crying for whole chapters. Cannot recommend enough!

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Simply amazing

absolutely the best book I've read in a long while, never have I ever listened to a book twice in. a row , amazing characters with superb archs in an incredibly well built world of tradition and modern aspects and incredible but brutal fight scenes
Loved the narration so much

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Excellent book that keeps you wanting more

A great book exploring many themes of expectation, grief, love and forgiveness. There are some confusing world building elements at the beginning and the way the book is set up makes you think there is more story to be told. overall a great listen

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