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| Book Cover via Amazon.com |
Opinion
I will admit, it’s been a while since I did a BookTaster’s Honest Review, but I’ve been busy lately, so for that and to Booktasters I apologize. However, I wanted to read something I am really into lately it’s been heaping piles of Historical Fiction. As I was looking over Twitter one fine morning, BookTasters happened to drop into my feed an amazing cover in one of their advertisements and I couldn’t help but pick the book up. “Shadow of the Raven” is a beautiful book. Now, understand I rarely discuss the beauty of book covers, but this one is very nice. It caught my attention and I really wanted to read it. I mean seriously everyone, it’s really pretty. This cover is as detailed and chiseled as the book is. This is one of those times the cover matches the story tone.
Let’s get this started on a very positive note, and that is how beautiful the book is on the outside and the inside. The cover is bathed in darkness, and the story is dark as well. The imagery that’s described in this book is detailed and lush, the character descriptions are detailed as are their clothes. For every beautiful thing to the story, there are four or five equally terrible things described. “Shadow of the Raven” in my opinion is both gorgeous and haunting in every aspect of those two stark contrasts, especially in the harshness of things. The book showed both evil violence and wholesome goodness displayed repeatedly. Historically, this is a book that likely has been fact-checked a billion times and came up clean as a whistle.
“Shadow of the Raven” travels with several people, but there is one main protagonist with the main plot and two subplot protagonists. Coming against everything there is and one serious antagonist, with a slew of medium to minor antagonists. Just reading this book, I was in awe of the amount of work put into the structure of the book, and it has an amazing story foundation to it.
The main plot has an interesting tale of a boy who grows up no longer with anything he had before. Things go from bad to worse, but he’s able to overcome many hardships He has to suffer through the loss of what matters most to him, even when people try to prevent it or help him stop it. He grows up and though he faces an even worse situation and later one with an ill-fated path to love, the story is tragic, poetic, and accomplished.
The primary subplot is about a king that has nothing to do at all with the main plot aside from a side plot to the main antagonist. He has an amazing life, but as time goes on that unravels and he watches all that he loves fade. Through the story this follows, it moves from this king to other members of the family, the story ebbs and flows, and narratively focuses on different people to focus on and eventually fades into the background.
Though there is one character specifically that ties the two plots together, neither the main plot nor subplot really interact. The one specific character is a big deal to one plot, and not that big of a deal to the other one. The situation makes this an interesting dilemma for me. I like the idea of a historical fantasy book that covers this period of time, and the things that happen in both stories. However, a subplot by most definitions of them should be there to culminate with the main plot. That didn’t happen here. It also wasn’t really resolved.
Let me move to a critique or two here. “Shadow of the Raven” is stuffed to the brim with the details, it is beautiful and it conveys emotions in the scenes, and brutality with the rituals. But with that, when you get to the meat of the plot, it’s very long and the actual story does not end on the points that were presented, and it’s very slow in places because of pacing. The tension ebbs and flows, but not in normal ways as tension should. Some stuff happens on the page, some stuff happens off page. Without the story having a real unification, I felt it wasn’t a complete novel. I want a story which has a full beginning, middle and ending to the points that were brought up in the story. As a reader, getting through 438 pages to never see the real end to the story, isn’t what I was expecting considering the details and imagery used.
Before anyone says “Mrs. Y, duh, it’s a series. The main plot will be concluded later,” I understand what you are saying, and I completely get your point very well. My counter-argument, however, currently there is a lot of series going around. Of just what I have been reading, the more engaging series have their individual books cover one aspect to the overall plot, not just the overall plot in chronological order moving to the next book in literal chronological order. Mirroring other series that do similar things, the beginning part could have been alluded to and detailed out better in the book where it would have been concluded so that the secondary antagonist could have been the primary conflict driver and focus of this book instead.
Lastly, and this is something I think I hinted at with the pacing issue, I think this should have been two books. I think that the secondary plot would have been a lovely book on its own, and could have accented the events of the first book nicely by showing what the main antagonist was doing. It’s more of an “I wish this had happened” critique, but it could have saved about two hundred pages from the manuscript and tightened up the main story much better, as well as given this really rich subplot, some room to expand properly.
That said, I am an amateur book reviewer. I love good stories so very much, and I think is why I’m so stuck on the story structure and not the imagery or facts. With regret, I must admit that I didn’t fall deeply and madly in love with “Shadow of the Raven”. For a historical fiction it’s okay, but for a story meeting all story requirements, it’s not as enjoyable to me.
Score
For me, with the structural issues, pacing, tension, and the few tiny grammatical things I found, this is an 80% which makes it a 4-star review on Goodreads and Amazon.
I’d like to thank Booktasters for helping me find this. I read it on Kindle Unlimited instead of asking for a free ARC copy, which was wonderful.
