February 2017 Book Club: Promise of Blood

Promise of Blood by Brian  McClellan

My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Clean


The Age of Kings is dead . . . and I have killed it.

I loved that line in the book description. It caught my attention and made me want to read this book.

I read Promise of Blood with my fantasy book club and ended up liking it quite a bit. However after meeting and discussing the book I feel slightly less enthusiastic about it than I did before. As one of the fellow book club members pointed out, it felt like the author lacked some knowledge about some of the things he was writing about, military strategy being at the top of the list. As these things were pointed out, things that initially I just glossed over as I read, because, what do I know about military strategy, I began to see the holes in the story and I couldn't help but agree that these were indeed problems. I generally read for enjoyment and I'm not a very analytical reader, but I appreciate the different types of readers in our book group because it gives me some other perspectives to think about. So in the end I'm taking a half star off my rating because my eyes were opened to looking at this book a little differently than I had at first.

All of that being said, I did still enjoy this book. I did find it hard to connect to some of the characters at first because some of them seemed really unlikable in the beginning. Most of them eventually grew on me, although I still dislike Tamas to a great degree. Taniel has grown on me to the point that I do enjoy reading about him and even like him. The characters I liked right away were Ka'Poel, Olem, Bo, Adamat, and Mihali, who was probably the best character in this whole book. I seriously love the whole chef thing he has going on with the magical food.

I would have liked a few chapters from Ka'poel's point of view as she is the most likable female character to me. She is the one character that I really want to learn more about because I feel we didn't get enough of her in the book. I'm planning on reading the next book in the series and probably the novella's that were written about the characters in the book because they will hopefully help to flesh out these characters more and show us who they are.