The Ember Blade by Chris Wooding

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Strong Language



A land under occupation. A legendary sword. A young man's journey to find his destiny.

Having previously read Chris Wooding's Ketty Jay series and finding it quite the fun read, I was looking forward to reading this. I'll start by saying that this book is completely different from the Ketty Jay series, but that's not a bad thing at all. This is more in the vein of classic fantasy with the sword, the quest to find it, and the champion who will wield it in order to save his people. Those are all things that have been done over and over before in fantasy, so I wouldn't say there is a lot new here, but the characters where all interesting; from Garric the tortured 'hero' with an axe to grind; to Aren the boy he hates, but saves; to Vika the Druid; to Grub the comic relief. Every character has an interesting story and I loved just about all of them. There are other characters I could mention, but you should really just read the book to find out about them all.

There were a few moments in the book that reminded me of The Lord of the Rings. One character has a very Gandalf moment, and I thought that was quite fun. My only real criticisms of the book are that it is slightly longer than I thought it needed to be. It felt like it took forever to get the end and I was ready for it to end at around the 80 percent mark. Also, as I mentioned already, there is nothing really new here. If you like traditional fantasy with a few dark tones added to it then you will probably really like this. I am going to continue on with this series, because I enjoyed it quite a lot.