**SPOILER ALERT** Spoilers everywhere. There's no other way to discuss it.

Directly from Goodreads: From #1 Bestselling author Morgan Rice comes the debut of a dazzling new fantasy series. With its sophisticated world-building and characterization, A Quest for Heroes is an epic tale of friends and lovers, of rivals and suitors, of knights and dragons, of intrigues and political machinations, of coming of age, of broken hearts, of deception, ambition and betrayal. It is a tale of honor and courage, of fate and destiny, of sorcery. It is a fantasy that brings us into a world we will never forget, and which will appeal to all ages and genders. It is 82,000 words.

From Me: I had no idea who Morgan Rice was, and I now know that previous works were about vampires and stuff. I did not find this to be sophisticated in any way, nor epic. It’s a fantasy that keeps you firmly planted right where you are, takes you nowhere overly exciting, and it most definitely suited to the very young YA crowd, minus one ale-house scene involving a sex worker (in which nothing happens anyway). Why is it important that it is 82,000 words? I have theories which range from wanting us to know it’s better than a novella (since there are 17 or so books in this series it smacks a little of ‘shorten each book, sell more copies overall’) but let’s give the benefit of the doubt. It’s both a manageable and impressive number. Here’s the thing though: ‘dazzling new fantasy’ means something to fantasy readers. The Hobbit was, what – 96000 words or so? But those were dense and impactfully written. A Quest of Heroes was unfortunately, not.

Fans of Morgan Rice, who I understand are quite rabid about the author. Edit: The difference in reviews between Amazon and Goodreads is quite profound.

The potential the book had, which is why I stuck it out. I read it in under 2 hours, but nearing the end I was mostly tuned out – you knew the ending, you knew it was a cliff-hanger, and it was pretty boring at that point. Boring at the cliff-hanger. Not a great sign.

I don’t know where to begin, because Morgan really ticked me off. Not because the book was bad (it was. I’m not going to lie). No, I’m ticked off because the book could have been really good. Like, really good. It didn’t matter that it was formulaic; there’s a market for that. It’s comforting and a lot of readers like to that they know sort-of what’s going on. But if you’re going to do formulaic, you must have originality within your formula. This is a direct copy of at least three, possibly five other stories so it’s quite a hot mess. And if you’re going to make it fantasy (and not adventure), throwing a damn wizard and some random magical powers in there doesn’t a fantasy make.

The world building is brutal. Two suns – mentioned once, no explanation, curiously affects nothing at all, despite them being two different colours. Morgan clearly did some vague research on Medieval Europe to get knights, jousts, armour, swords, some pretty Scottish sounding names, etc. But that’s what this reads like – medieval Europe – kind of—even that’s not spectacular. So why am I on a planet with two suns?

We’ve got this kid, Thor (Thorgrin, actually) who has never left his village. Ever. But he immediately recognizes the king’s wizard. Oh, ok. Thor is essentially the Cinderella of his family, and has to fight to accepted into the legion army and is immediately taken under the wing of the best knight, and the king. Oh, ok. I can be down with this. It makes sense – and then it doesn’t.

So – the bunch of stories wrapped up into one. First, we’ve got David and Goliath. Thor just happens to be a shepherd, who is really, really, really-really-really good with a slingshot. So logically, he takes down a tremendously huge beast before the wizard tells him he’s special.

Harry Potter – that big ol’ beast – well, Thor develops magical powers that help him save him from said beast, but of course he didn’t know he had them, and nobody had told him that he had them, even though someone clearly knew he had them, and he uses them again later, but he can’t really control them yet AND he gets a falcon. I mean it’s a nice falcon. I like falcons. I also liked Hedwig (RIP). You’re a wizard, Thorgrin.

Sword in the Stone – there’s the destiny sword that no one can pick up, but of course only royalty is allowed to try. Not some dusty commoner. But whoever can pick up that sword is destined to save the world or something. Gee….who’s going to pick up that sword. Gwendolyn. That’s my guess.

Romeo/Juliet – repeated twice, though the second one is not quite as blatent.

GOT - there a wall (granted this one is magic) and there's wildings or wilders or wild-somethings on the other side.

I am no grammar expert. I look a lot of things of up. I also look up a lot of things in the dictionary. But I can tell you the grammar in this book means it was either not edited or the editor needs to be fired. Need more proof that I’m not just full of snark? Okay:

When you “run by someone” do you a) race past or b) race passed? In this book, you RACE PASSED.

When you clean up after a horse, are you a) shoveling horse waste or b) horse waist? In this book, you shovel HORSE WAIST. That poor horse. Getting all banged up with a shovel.

When you hunt for birds, do you a) hunt fowl or b) hunt foul? Here, we HUNT FOUL, probably because no one is picking up the horse waste.

I want to be a reader, not an editor and these things, in a published book really impacted the enjoyability of the story. I can handle a printing error on occasion – a misplaced period I have seen. But not this. I’m so mad.

And I’m not against plain-language writing. Not everything has to be fluffy and lyrical, but the sentence structure, dialogue, character building is cliché and just plain bad. I’m also not against YA – I read it all the time -Rick Riordan, Charlie Higgson,JK, etc. This falls short of solid YA and tries to pass itself off as adult because of booze.

The plot falls apart several times – travels that take almost no time at the beginning take hours and hours later on (and not on purpose). They legitimately try to kill their recruits, which seems like a questionable way to build a massive army. The hunt boar as a national pastime, but have not yet figured out that spears are the best way to do so. I don't hunt boar and I know that. The king loves Thor, trusts him completely, thinks he’s the most honourable of honourable – yet he warns the king of poison, then saves the king from poison and the logical outcome is that he is blamed for trying to poison the king. I’m not even kidding. And then the blurb for the next book tells me that he has to escape from jail – so that means the king never gets his head right?

Cry. There was so much potential in this book. I hate it when goes like this. I know it’s not my book, and I don’t want to rewrite it. I just wish they had an editor who saw the potential and made them step up.

I know how hard fantasy writing can be - I've tried it myself. I know my own shortcomings and even so, I know at the very least, I'd need an editor.

I really want to like this book, but I am just so disappointed.

I won’t be continuing the series.

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of A Quest of Heroes (Book #1 in the Sorcerer's Ring)   from Amazon.Com!

Created Jan 07, 2018 at 12:24pm • Submit your own review...