Review: The Paladin Prophecy by Mark Frost

I know I've complained over the past few reviews about picking out bad books, but to be honest, just because I don't like a particular book, doesn't mean that it has no merit. It's only when I read a truly terrible book that my blood gets boiling and I begin to pull out the cannons and really prepare to wage war and that's only happened two times: I'll let my faithful readers decide what books those were. When I pick up a book, I generally know within the first chapter if it's my kind of book, a genre of fantasy I can really get into, but it takes much longer for me to figure out if it's a GOOD book. A book I'm not into I will put back on my shelf and save for when I find someone who may make a good owner for. A bad book, I read through all the way so that I can share my findings here.]

The Paladin Prophecy by Mark Frost was just that kind of bad book that I enjoy having come across my desk so that, like a finicky food critic, I can discuss the exact flavor of which I hated it.

The Paladin Prophecy is a book written by Mark Frost, a man I had no idea existed because he's famous for two things. The first is that he co-created a tv show called Twin Peaks that lasted for two seasons. I won't go into the show, because I never watched it, but apparently it was about an FBI agent solving a murder. He also co-wrote the Fantastic Four movies....but after watched the second movie, I'm not sure that that's anything to brag about.

The second thing he's famous for is writing a few books that I looked up, that seem to be based off a character of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and are a bit like mysteries. I take this of note because The Paladin Prophecy from what I've seen, this book is the first that Frost has done in the genre of Sci-fi/Fantasy and that places him firmly in my jurisdiction.

The Paladin Prophecy is about a boy named Will West who has lived his whole life trying to be ordinary. His parents, who have moved him around a lot throughout the years, have instructed him to never stand out and show how special he is. One day, Will finds out that he scored off the charts on a nationwide test and that he's been accepted to a prestigious school for geniuses. That same day, Will's parents get captured by a mysterious group of men and Will is forced to run away across the country to save himself.

I usually never use the term Sci-fi/Fantasy, because it's my belief that with very few exceptions they would never be mixed. But The Paladin Prophecy can't seem to make up its mind what genre it wants to be. On the one hand it has all the feeling of a fantasy with special powers and prophecies as well as holy knights, but on the other there are definite ESP/telekinetic moments as well as the fact that almost everything in the story is technology moments. It was definitely a feeling of "Keep your chocolate out of my peanut butter" kind of things that only got more convoluted as things went by. Halfway through the book, the story went from being about a kid who might be genetically enhanced to some kind of Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew/Scooby Doo crap where Will and his new friends at school decide to solve a mystery. I'm a big fan of the creative process, but The Paladin Prophecy had all the feel of a man who has three genres on a table and can't decide which to do so he just does them all.

The writing itself was generic and I kept flashing back on several other stories I've read over the years, Harry Potter being the most prominent obviously. Also, a big pet peeve of mine over the course of the book were THE RULES. Will's dad has created a list of rules throughout his life and Will has taken to them like a rich man to the country club guidelines. Every few page (sometimes even more frequently) a rule will pop up in big caps letting Will decide how he should act. There were two problems with this, the biggest part being the flow of the book. Having little rules of thumb pop up in the middle of the page was distracting and ruined the flow as much as having someone bang pots in the kitchen might and were almost as bad as Little-Did-They-Know moments. I don't know why Frost thought that these things were important enough to build a theme about because he could just as easily have made his character do the right thing rather than have it be his dad who drilled him over the years to memorize it. It all comes down to this: do you want a character who knows how to do the right thing on his own, or do you want a man with a parrot screeching in your ear every five minutes reminding you of a catechism that applies to just this kind of situation.

That brings me to the second problem with the rules. While the book approaches them as rules, most of them aren't even that. Don't get me wrong: while "Don't draw attention to yourself" might pass off for a rule, "There is no such thing as a coincidence" is not. It's sound advice, but for the most part, the rules of the book just pass off advice and common colloquialisms as a rule of life. It had all the air of a man who quotes famous people from history and tries to convince you that he said it first. Frost even has the gall to add the rules at the end of the book as if people are going to really want to remember that one rule that he said a few chapters off but can't remember. Here's a clue: they're in CAPS, I think they're fairly easy to find.

Not an easy segue way, but that brings me to the characters. For the most part, there were a lot of unique characters in the story, and each of them had a part to play, but it had a very cluttered feeling to them. Each character was introduced piece by piece throughout the story, and then quickly dismissed for the next, giving the feel of a group of attention-grabbing beauty queens on a tv show who are terrified they might get voted off. Almost every kind of stereotype was used. The shrimpy nerd, the smart bitchy one, the rich girl and the guy that should the white boy that needs to learn proper English. Once again, I had two problems with the characters. The first was a Hispanic taxi driver named Nando: he was so obviously stereotyped throughout the story that I can't help but feel it was a little racist. Nando has a billy-goat beard, barbed wire tattoos, and says things like "a'ight", "holmes" and "esse". While I know that some people say these things, some of them hispanic, a lot of it is just broad generalization. Most of the time Nando is portrayed as being this dumb gofer who helps out Will for some reason or other. The other character problem for me is that Frost seems to think that Samoan's are some kind of master race. The entire security force for the new school Will goes to is comprised of Samoans and the reason given for this is that they are: "huge and agile and strong enough to tear a bus apart with their bare hands" as well as "friendly, trustworthy, and incorruptible". I'm sorry, I actually had to stop there. While I will never say that those things aren't true about a person, saying it out loud is like saying Klingon's all stink and that munchkins all like lollypops. I think you get what I mean.

As far as the writing goes, I have a big problem with the fact that Will seems to just include himself in a group whenever he feels threatened. At one point he’s talking about people wanting to kill him and tells his roommates "We" have to do something and they just accept it as true as if they've known him longer than a hundred pages. At one point they even go down to talk to a man who just tried to kill him as if he’s just going to stand there and go "Oh yeah, sorry about that, my bad". A lot of the conclusions Will comes up with are completely unfounded because there was no real linearity to him discovering it, once again concreting my disdain for urban fantasy not involving a detective.

Which brings me to my last point to make before I stop my spewing of literary rage, and I think this is a big part. Will gets noticed by this school because he scored exceptionally high on a test. This would generally paint Will as being smarter that the average bear, but it's never shown. Not once does Will actually do anything moderately intelligent. This isn't to say that he is "stupid", though at some points in the book I had to stop reading and shake my book like an African lion trying to break a zebras neck, but he never actually shows that he's intelligent. This holds true for the other characters in the book. While they all have special skill, most of them have nothing to do with intelligence really. It all had a feeling of convenience: Will needed to be discovered by the school so that he could go and learn about other things. This was a common theme throughout the book: Will is constantly discovering the things he can do just when he has a problem, or help comes at the exact moment when he needs it, or there is a RULE that applies to just that situation. A story can be built around a lot of things, but having them built around convenience is the biggest Deus ex Machina crap that you can do and it's just lazy writing to boot.

While I can't deny that The Paladin Prophecy by Mark Frost had an interesting premise, I have to say that I don't believe Frost has enough expertise in the field of Fantasy to do the story justice. I think that every author at some point should take an expedition out into the world of mages and beasts, but I think Frost might have taken his first step too soon. He shouldn't be pitied or shown the way back, but I do think he should be pat on the head, scooted to the corner and given a cookie while the big boys get to work. Personally, I just feel the book had “bad book” stamped over every page like the world’s most travelled passport, and I don’t suggest it to anyone. A lot of these things can be marked off by claiming the book is targeted for young adults, but that’s a crap excuse. Young Adult writers should be held to a higher standard than adult writers in my opinion.

Second Glance: Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey

I usually leave second glance reviews for books I read years back before I started doing reviews, or even looking at books critically altogether. But as anyone who is up to date on my blog knows, I made a promise for this one. Several months ago I read a digital copy of Devil Said Bang and found that a good chunk of the books was missing. I said that if I found a hard copy of the book and it turned out that it was actually missing and not some stylistic choice of the writer, then I would rescind my statement. Well, I found a hard copy, found that the story WAS missing from the digital copy, and I'm not taking down my original review. I've never apologized for having a contrary opinion, and I'm not going to start now. To be honest, the missing pages probably made the story better.

Devil Said Bang is an Urban Fantasy novel written by a pretty badass author named Richard Kadrey. In the books, the main character, James Stark AKA Sandman Slim, is a man with the most abysmal luck. He was sent to Hell while he was still alive, tortured, came back to get revenge and was thwarted at every turn by the people who sent him there. Assisted by a talking head, an immortal alchemist, a woman who picks the damnedest times to get scruples, and a girlfriend who is a repressed monster, Stark still has the time in his life to worry about silly things like movie stores, and clothing.

In the latest story, after being Shanghai-d in Hell to be the new Lucifer, Stark is trying to get back and stay alive at the same time, and that's about how far I got in the digital copy before the big skip...132 pages of missing pages to be exact. I counted. I say that the missing pages made the book better because of this: there is no sense of linearity. The problem with Urban Fiction that doesn't involve a detective is that the characters don't go through life looking for how things connect, so often times, in the story they don't. For example: a detective might see a toothpick at a crime scene, remember that the dead man's chauffeur had one in his mouth all the time, and connect that to the gun they find on him that matches the bullet used to kill him. In a story with Joe Schmoe, he has to wait until the person who’s killing people puts a gun against his kidney.

Stark goes from trying to get out of Hell, to trying to find out who's gunning for him, finding a killer, getting back home, finding some conspiracy involving people he's just meeting, and then there's actually no resolution at the end at all. There was something to do with a ghost that might not have just been a ghost, that's killing people for no apparent reason. The reason they gave was kind of pathetic, which may have been the point, and then when they finish the job, she's just kind of gone? Where's the climax? Where's the meat of the story? It just seemed like Stark went through all the trouble to get out of Hell just to babysit or something.

This was of course on top of all the typos that were in the book. Names were transposed with other names that confused me, words were misspelled, missing, or sentences just didn't make any sense at all. I've re-read a few of Richard Kadrey's previous books, and they were never as bad as this. I know I said it before, but there might be something wrong with Kadrey's publishers, because if it was this bad when he turned it in, then that's on him, but the fact that all of this got through to print makes me think that they dropped the ball here and should be held accountable. People pay good money for digital and especially pricy hardback books, and should get what they pay for. I love the story of Sandman Slim, and will eagerly await his next book, but I have a feeling that Devil Said Bang is going on my list of books I just can't get into anymore.

Review: The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks

On Brent Weeks, you sneaky bastard. After about two years of waiting for the sequel to The Black Prism, I was expecting another fiasco like with Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Trilogy. Despite my misgivings, The Blinding Knife was the kind of wonderful book I hate reviewing because the bad parts sound worse after standing in awe of such a fantastic fantasy writer.

For those that haven't read the first book, I'll just gloss over the facts so I don't reveal too much of the spoilers. The Blinding Knife is the second book in the Lightbringer series (which i can only pray is just a trilogy) taking place in a land ruled by 7 different "satrapies" and a culture dominated by people called "Drafters". Drafters can control different colors in the light spectrum to create things: anything from tools to weapons and everything in between. Because of the strain such power puts on a person, Drafters have a fairly short shelf life depending on how frequently they draft and how powerful they are. When drafters "break the halo" they go mad.

The main characters of the story are Gavin Guile, the spiritual leader of the government that controls the drafters, and his bastard son Kip, a powerful, but self deprecating child. There are many other characters introduced throughout the story, which I'll get to later, but for the most part, Gavin and Kip are the ones to look out for. While Gavin is going about his business trying to save the world and working through some serious issues, Kip is learning to control his colors and working to become a Blackguard (elite drafters who protect Gavin and other high ranking members of the government.)

My favorite thing about Kip is that he is the perfect anti-hero. Even though he is immensely powerful, a quick witted smartass, and always does his best to save the day, he is so self deprecating I'm always surprised he doesn't start cutting himself halfway through a conversation with his fellow classmates. A lot of this has to do with his backstory: his mother was an emotionally abusive drug addict and his father is the most powerful and influential drafter in the world. It's enough to give anyone a complex, but no matter what Kip accomplishes, he always finds a way to show a way that he failed, making him such a flawed character that I can't help but  want to give him a hug and a cookie before telling him to go watch cartoons while the adults are busy.

On the flip side, Gavin is less likable in my opinion. Gavin is the Prism, the most powerful drafter in the world and the spiritual leader of Brent Weeks story. Gavin is not limited by the limitations of other drafters. While Gavin presents a cocky, self assured attitude, he has so many secrets that he always give off an air that he is misunderstood. There were so many times in the books that Gavin could have done something to fix his situation but doesn't and waxes at length about how misunderstood he is and how he wishes things were different.

As far as the writing goes, I have little in the way of complaint except for the speeches Gavin gives realism vs. believability, and the character shifts. First off were the long speeches Gavin gives about various things and indeed, some of them are given by other characters. Whole pages are filled up with exposition where Gavin or someone else will tell exactly how things go in paragraphs so long, even I feel winded reading them. While some of it was very important to the storyline, it just felt overdone to me (a little like Professor Binns in Harry Potter, the History of Magic teacher who puts people into comas just by talking.)

One of my issues I actually brought up on Brent Weeks twitter page, but here's just one example. Kip, who is kind of a country boy, is going out to a naval war and describing ships in great detail, everything to the terminology for parts of the boat to the different names for them. Later on, another character who has been trained in battle for years, goes on to say that she can't name any of the different sized ships. While naming the ships was realistic, it wasn't believable that Kip knew the smallest of minute details about every type of ship on the seas but his friends look at them and just say boat.

I've raged about shifting character views too much, but Brent Weeks almost seemed to have that under control in the first book. While there were about four characters in the last book, all of whom were given rich detail, this time Weeks did something new. Inter-spaced in the chapters are small chapters going into other characters lives. These chapters hardly lasted longer than a page or two, and while one or two of them was important, for the most part they seemed random and unhelpful to the actual plot. While I wouldn't be surprised if they show up to be important later on, I don't see them being all that memorable in two years when the next book coming up. To me they were kind of like a friend asking if you remember that one guy who worked at dairy queen two years ago.

For the most part, though, The Blinding Knife was an excellent book. While I was reading it I found myself setting it down after a few pages, just to make sure that I wouldn't finish it too soon, and I can't wait for the third book, The Blood Mirror.

On Writing: Believability Vs. Realism

Over the last few weeks I've read a surprising amount of short stories by people who are looking to get into writing. The common factor among most, if not all of them, was the fight for realism. For many writers, there is a fight to make what they write the perfect mixture of believability and realism, because let’s be honest, even in fantasy, there's only so much disbelief you can suspend before it becomes too much.

Suspension of disbelief is like filling a cup: the more you fill it, the less it can hold. It's also true that as we get older, the cup gets smaller because when we are younger, we have a greater capacity for make believe. When we get older, we need more facts to show how things work: we want to know that magic works because people who can use it are fundamentally different than us, and that monsters aren't around anymore because people out there hunt them.

Realism and believability are intricately connected, they both affect one another. Just for an example, a friend of mine told me about a Civil War story he is planning. In the story, a Russian soldier is introduced, and I had to stop him right at that point and ask him if there were really Russian soldiers in the United States during the Civil War. While he assured me that there were, and I believe him since he is a big American history enthusiast as far as wars are concerned, the fact that I had to stop him to find out make it less believable, and can hamper a story in the long run. Realism, on its own, can hold a story back, because just like a joke with a ten dollar word attached to it, it's not a funny if you have to look it up.

One of the reasons that science fiction has risen so high in popularity is its attachment to believability. While most of the things that are involved may never happen, they still are attached to something that is true technologically. We may never create something that can transport someone over a long distance instantaneously, but the fact that we see the machine and the people working it, makes it entertaining. Fantasy, on the other hand, tries to add realism to a subject to create a better image of what we will never see outside of CGI and magic tricks.

The best stories merge the two, creating a perfect blend of the realistic and believable imagery that we can wrap our minds around, and entice readers to want to read more about their world where anything can happen.

Double Feature: Devil in the Dollhouse and Devil Said Bang by Richard Kadrey

After reading Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews, I was beginning to think that my bad luck with picking out books was finally behind me.At the same time, I figured it would be in my best interest to pick out an author that I've enjoyed since discovering them, just to be on the safe side.  I'm beginning to think some malevolent force is taunting me now, because even with that choice, I'm beginning to sound cynical even to me.

Richard Kadrey is one of my all time favorite authors of Urban Fantasy (though the top three are still safe and secure) and my favorite as far as unique story-telling. Kadrey has written a number of novels, but the best, in my opinion, has been the Sandman Slim books. In the stories, the main character, James Stark, escapes from a tormented existence in hell to get revenge against the people who sent him there when he was still breathing.

Throughout the novels, we learn more and more about James: his origins, his dreams, his favorite way to kill things that piss him off. My favorite thing about these books is that while they are violent and repulsively destructive, they actually happen for a reason. James doesn't destroy everything just cause it's fun. He does it because the things that make the world go round keep crapping on him and he just wants to get by with his clothes unsoiled.

 What I love about Richards writing is that he is a master at imagery, and he uses it for purely destructive reasons. With a lot of books, writers try to give you a good description of things that are happening. Kadrey takes it one step further by giving some of the most mind destroying images you can possibly imagine and forcing you mind to go right to them. Early on in the book, Stark is giving his lackeys a description of what he wants hell to look like, based off the movie "Metropolis". As he's telling them about this movie, he goes one step further by telling them the buildings look like "dragons fucking a spaceship," and as awful as that image is, it's the first thing that popped into my head. My own personal feelings about cussing in books is that it should only be done to enhance a situation. James Stark cussing is like listening to two Germans having an argument about about soccer: it all may sound harsh, and I certainly couldn't understand any of it, but they don't mean anything bad about it.

Devil in the Dollhouse is a short story by Kadrey, taking place in between books three and four. Stuck in Hell by Lucifer and forced to take over, Stark does his best to get by, but is forced to take up a job that even Lucifer didn't want completed. As short as the story actually is, I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but I thought it was really well written, and gave me a nice taste of the Sandman Slim world while I was waiting to read the fourth book. I wish I had enjoyed it a little bit more, because Devil Said Bang was definitely lacking.

Devil Said Bang starts up where Aloha From Hell, the third book left off, and had a good running start. Stuck as Lucifer in Hell, Stark is forced to go through some meaningless work as a glorified politician, trying to get Hell back in working order after the fight between the forces of Heaven and Hell laid it to waste. Stark is just trying to get everything in working order so that he can go back to earth to get his life back in order.

The book was great for a good half of it. My eReader (yes I use one. Bookstores aren't open 24 hours like gas stations and when I have an itch, I scratch it) says the book is 231 pages long. On page 96, the story takes a trip from "I love this book so much I want to frame it," to almost tossing a $200 piece of metal out my window and into the rain.

The first half of the book is almost entirely Stark trying to find his way out of hell, and eventually getting his wish, but as soon as it happens, there is a gigantic gap the size of an aircraft carrier to drive through where not only is Stark back in L.A., but he's also mysteriously in the middle of a job where ten different people are being talked about that I've never even heard about. People he knew before he went down to Hell are interacting as if he was out for a smoke, though over three months have passed since he was gone.

And I looked, there's no temporal dissidence (the space that exists between when an event happens and when the author writes it). It's almost as if these are two different stories, in which someone cut the end of one book and the beginning of another and tried to glue them together before anyone noticed. Think the beginning of The Goonies when the kids knock over the naked statue and glued it back on upside down. I felt like someone was pissing in my face.

Now I'd like to give the benefit of the doubt, so I'm sure in the next few days I'll start looking for a hard copy of this book, but in the meantime, this is just bad work on the part of the publisher if this is some kind of mistake, and an awful job by Kadrey if he meant for his book to be like this. There are no reunion between friends. There's no explanation to who the people are in the story, some of them very old characters, and a few I never even heard about being treated as if they were there the whole time and I was too stupid to notice. What's even worse is that I looked ahead in the book, pages 161-231 are complete copies of pages 96-160, meaning while I was charged for 231 pages, I only got 160 pages worth of a story, and even that wasn't enough to be a cohesive whole.

I will look into this further, and do a completely different review if it comes out that there was some kind of mistake, but in the meantime, I really have to say, Devil Said Bang was a drastic let down. It really makes me wish I had held out for The Blinding Knife by Brent Weeks. The book would have been more expensive, and the author isn't exactly my favorite, but at least he is consistent in his writing.

Review: Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews

What is the hardest thing about reviewing a book? When you actually know how to read and spell words, the easiest thing in the world is telling people what you thought about it. The hardest thing to do, in my opinion, is review a book that you like.

I've done bad reviews. Anyone who has read anything I've done here knows that I don't hold back. But when it's a good book I always get this dull look on my face and feel the need to write out in big letters, "THIS BOOK WAS AWESOME!" and not much more than that. On the opposite end of things, when I read a book I hate, I can tell you in what flavor of hate it , anywhere from the "I didn't care for this book, but maybe it's just not for me" category, to,"I wouldn't recommend this to anyone with two brain cells to rub together." That being the case, reviewing Gunmetal Magic by Ilona Andrews is somewhat of a challenge because I love everything about her books. But bear with me, I'll do my best.

I could go on an on about the intricacies of Ilona Andrews books in great detail, but put simply, the women in her novels kick ass. From a femanist perspective, the women of Ilona Andrews take charge in a way that is refreshing and inspiring in a way I don't see in other books with female protagonists, but still retain their female perspectives. The reason why, is that the women in her books aren't just protagonists, they are heroes.

Gunmetal Magic takes place in the same literary world as her other books about a character named Kate Daniels. In this world, magic returned to the world and caused a semi-apocalypse. Sky-scrapers fell, worn down by magical forces while forests grew. Technology began fading, monsters began appearing, and people began changing. Shapeshifters and Vampires became prominent focal points of society, as well as magicians and necromancers (specifically people who can control vampires with their will).

After a while, magic and technology began fighting for control, making it that sometimes technology works fine and sometimes it shuts off and world starts a never ending battle to survive with magical forces. Kate Daniels, the main character of many of Andrew's books taking place in a post-shift Atlanta, Georgia, was a mercenary with strange powers, a mysterious past, and a sword that can cut through undead like a hot knife through...well...undead. She has a connection to the Pack, the local group of shape shifters living under the rule of the beast lord, Curran, and over the stories, develops a more romantic entanglement.

One of my favorite things about the characters in the Kate Daniels books is that while the men are all masculine and dominant, the women have no problems going toe to toe with them and even coming out on top. This was true of the original series, and is no different in the spin-off book, Gunmetal Magic.

The main character in Gunmetal Magic, is Andrea Nash. Andrea started out in the second or third book of the original series as a close friend and colleague of Kate's, working for The Order of Merciful Aid, a form of law enforcement in the series dealing with specifically magical issues. Andrea came off as a gun nut and a blond bombshell all mixed into one, and I loved as the character filled out of the series and was given a more prominent roll.

Andrea is secretly a beastkin. In the series, humans who develop Lycanthropy, otherwise called Lyc-V, become shape shifters. On the other side of things, animals can also develop the virus and change into humans. It's been a while since I first read about them in the story, but for the most part, these kinds of shape shifters are almost always killed on sight. This gave Andrea an interesting plot because not only does she avoid the Pack, but the Order didn't know about her either because they frown on non-humans to the point of bigotry.

In the story of Gunmetal Magic, Andrea is finding her way in the world after being outed as a shape shifter and losing her job for the Order. She now works for her friend, Kate, as a kind of private investigator, and is coming to terms with being who she is. During the course of the story, Andrea is given a job by the Pack to investigate the murder of four shape shifters working for her ex-lover, Raphael.


The books is a lot of fun to read. It sounds silly saying it, but while there were a lot of serious things take place, the characters get breaks to be frivolous and even kind of funny (the scene with Andrea getting revenge on Raphael was particularly hilarious, as well as watching Raphael getting territorial.) The fight scenes were well done and interesting and everyone just meshed well together.

Now comes the inevitable slide down to what I didn't like about this book. While it was well written and the characters are unique and fit together so well, there are points in the book that are harder to follow, especially if someone were a first time reader. Characters and events were brought up in the story, but not given greater detail, which was the same problem I had with The Spirit War. If you are starting fresh on this book, you probably wouldn't know who many of the characters are, and Andrews doesn't go into great detail about who they are or what happened that she is bringing up. I find this is harder on the plot because I keep feeling the need to go back through previous books and read about what she is talking about.

The only other thing I didn't get was the continuity issue she had at one point, and I know it's just me nit-picking, but continuity should never be optional in the editing process. When Andrea goes to interview a possible suspect in the murders, there is a big sign at the front desk saying "Happy Birthday Boss". When Andrea asks how old the boss is, the secretary says 48. When she actually gets introduced to the boss later on in the story, she describes him as being in his late thirties. As far as errors go, it's small, but a small error in The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks gave away the plot twist in the first quarter of the book by saying the wrong name, and a single decimal point mistake can kill a person.

All in all, Gunmetal Magic was a wonderful read that I would recommend to anyone already into the series, but for people who are interested in getting into it, you should definitely start with Magic Bites, the first book in the series. It's an equally great read, and much less confusing that way.