The Brightest Shadow - Review
Link to the author's (S. Lin) personal website
Book 1: The Brightest Shadow
Book 2: A Hollow Mountain
Book 3: The Unnecessary Victory
Blurb: (From Book 1) The arrival of the Hero was worse than anyone could have imagined.
To take her place as a full warrior of her tribe, Tani must travel across the vast grasslands of the Chorhan Expanse. But she has her sights set higher than a mere ritual journey: she wants to uncover a solution to the impending war that threatens her people. Her world has never been peaceful, torn between the many cultures that meet on the Chorhan Expanse, but the greatest threat is an expansionist army of monstrous non-humans who call themselves the mansthein.
Legends tell of monsters who will attempt to conquer the world, but are the mansthein those monsters? Tani believes that peace may be possible, but there are others on both sides who believe in the legends with zealous devotion. All around her, warriors have their eyes on a glorious victory with no concern for the piles of bodies they'll create on the way.
Tani will be joined by a killer pretending to be a healer, a mansthein commander struggling with his orders, a thief who pawned her heart of gold, and a strategist exiled from a foreign land.
But none of them are the Hero. It doesn't matter how many shades of gray might exist, some people see only in black and white. And the terrifying truth is that the stories they tell might not be just legends.
Review: I really could not put this book down. It wasn't because I was enthralled with it, but because I would have been frustrated not to have finished it. This series is best described as a house, whose structure is western-style epic fantasy, but whose furniture is entirely chinese-style wuxia.
I enjoyed the multiple point-of-views through the eyes of so many lovely characters. The general pacing of the story for a progression-style fantasy is excellent, and the world-building is done fantastically. This series is large however, and I feel like much of the content could be shortened if the writing were to be improved. This criticism is entirely negated if content is released on a chapter-by-chapter basis, which I think would read amazingly. I also must add that the interactions and connections between the sages of the hero are just simply fun to read.
I originally started reading this book because of a description containing a cursed yet destined hero. The description failed to convey just how cursed and inevitably destined. I would ultimately recommend this book for those in the market for an extremely long epic fantasy series that is actually a progression fantasy series, but not for many other scenarios even if I personally enjoyed it.