The Echoes Saga Books 1-9
Series rating: 3.78 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Mild Profanity, SA (not detailed), Torture (not much detail)
The Ranger Archives books 1-3
Series rating: 4 of 5 stars
Category: Adult
Genre: Fantasy
Content: Mild Language, A child is assassinated
I finally finished The Echoes Saga, and what a long reading journey it has been! I started this series in March 2024. It was a buddy read at Fantasy Buddy Reads with a couple of other people. By the end it was just two of us. It took us over a year to finish it along with the prequel trilogy, The Ranger Archives. Because these two series are very related to each other I'm going to talk about both of them. We read the first three books in The Echoes Saga, that worked as a trilogy on their own. That's the way the series is set up. There are trilogies within the series. There are also some huge time jumps between them. We took a break from The Echoes Saga after the first three books and read The Ranger Archives. Then we came back to this series and finished it. So that was twelve books and a novella in just over a year. There were a couple of months that we decided to take breaks from reading. I found the breaks necessary for me. Being immersed in one big fantasy world for so long is a nice experience but it also gets repetitive.
There are things I liked about this series and things I wasn't so crazy about. The things I liked were compelling enough for me to continue to the end. I do feel like there was a lot of repetition in this series that could have been cut out. There was a bit too much telling about some events and too much repeating of others. This author is good at writing battles and I appreciated that, but I do think there were too many. If there are too many battles in a book I end up starting to zone out, and that did happen occasionally. I think this series could have been cut down to just six or seven books. I also think that with the length of this series, there should have been more character development.
Speaking of characters, my favorites ended up being Russell, Doran, and Asher. These three characters were featured heavily in The Ranger Archives and I think that's probably why I liked that trilogy even better than this series. I have to say that I'm really glad I took a break and read The Ranger Archives before I finished The Echoes Saga, because we get all of Russell's backstory there, and I would have been missing some things about his character if I hadn't read it. I would say if you are wanting to read these books, then go ahead and read the prequel trilogy first. Overall, I enjoyed reading about the Dwarves and their different clans, and also the dragons. Elijah's time learning to become a Dragorn was a part that I liked a lot too. And of course, anytime Asher was on the page was enjoyable. Asher was, to me, the most well developed character in the series.
As I said before, I feel like there could have been more character development in these books. That's the main reason I never connected with Kassian. He was introduced, along with his wife Clara, in book seven and just kind of thrown in there as if he had always been there. When tragedy befell them, it had little effect on me because I barely knew them, and so that story element was a bit wasted in my opinion. The characters Reyna and Nathaniel were likable characters but there relationship started out very much like instalove. Later on in the series I appreciated their relationship, but it could have been better developed in the beginning. Overall, I think there were too many characters in the series, and it was too hard to develop them all the way they needed to be. The first book introduced way too many characters, and had too many character points of view. This got better as the series went on.
In the beginning of this series the author didn't hold back on some horrible things happening to characters, and this continued in later books as well, to one character in particular. These parts were hard to read at times, but I appreciate that they were mostly left to the imagination and there was no real detail given. I'm not one of those people who can read detailed torture or SA scenes. Because the author didn't hold back on these things, and because of the number of battles in the series, especially in the last book, I was expecting a lot more deaths in this series than there actually were. Generally, I don't like when there are too many deaths in a series, but in this case, I do feel like it would have been more impactful for me if there had been. There were so many characters in this series that it could have stood to lose more.
Overall, The Echoes Saga was an enjoyable series with a few characters that I became attached to even though I think they could have been better developed. I liked the world building and the dragons. For me the best books in the series were books 3 and 8, with my least favorite being books 4, 5, and 6. I got very frustrated while reading those three books and they were a bit of a downer as well. I think the antagonist in these books, The Crow had too much power. As for The Ranger Chronicles, I enjoyed all three of those books equally. I'm planning to read the other prequel series that's still being written, A Time of Dragons. Just not for at least a year. In the meantime I want to explore some other fantasy worlds.
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