Cor (the Baldrian) lives in a village that is cut off from the rest of the world by magical boundaries. Year by year they've been losing farmland to a blight. When he accidentally finds his way through, he knows he has to explore—he finds an Element, an ancient being who turns into a Fossil and tasks Cor with restoring the Elements and saving the world. He soon joins up with Brayleigh (the girl from Fernstead) who has a magical Fossil stone of her own, and from there they adventure!
This book is part epic fantasy, part fairy tale, and part political satire. The language reminds me of a storyteller having fun with words. The story is like a novel-version of Princess Navina visits Malvolia. The adventurers come across multiple places governed by people who claim not to be governing because their aim is for 'equality'...but each is proven to be corrupt and it's up to Cor and company to save the day.
There is plenty of magic, lots of swordfighting, and a healthy combination of the twain. I enjoyed reading the book, although some sections felt a bit repetitive and I wonder if these wanderers will ever learn their lesson. It was basically in 3 parts and it is a bit strange that 2 arcs could be concluded so solidly and yet the book ends sort of in the middle of the 3rd arc. It ends after a whirlwind of action and very abruptly, causing one to flip back to the prologue and look for a hidden conclusion....I guess I'll have to wait until the sequel!
While I had fun with the language for the most part, I did find myself skipping the opening and ending of each chapter fairly frequently as I found it flourishing flowery fluff. I also had a hard time following which character had the point of view. The action would switch around to the various members of the party and you'd go from 'the Baldrian' to ... 'she'. Which 'she'? And later it would be 'he' ... which 'he'?
I received a copy of the book in exchange for a review. I didn't expect to find such a fun book! ( )

First complaint was the page numbers were too small. It was boring as heck and didn’t grab my attention right away. Way too many fancy words. I couldn’t understand them or even know how to pronounce them. The fighting scenes were boring.The fighting scene at the end of the book wasn’t too bad. I just think the author was trying too hard. ( )

There was no aspect of this book I can say I enjoyed.
The prose aimed for poetic, but too poorly written to be anything but pretentious, repetitive, and a slog to get through. It’s a young poet’s first encounter with a thesaurus.
I may be biased because I am not a monarchist and very much do not believe in the divine right of kings, but the political commentary was borderline insufferable. It consisted of the same one-note caricatures showing up in various locales, all but turning to the audience and saying, ‘My beliefs are stupid, hypocritical, and out of touch, socialism is bad, equality is evil,’ for the main characters to reply, ‘Yes, and monarchy is the solution’. It was as nuanced and engaging as a single-panel political cartoon in a second-rate newspaper but stretched out over hundreds of pages.
The main characters oscillate between having almost no personality and being irritating. They aren’t much beyond their stereotypes.
The plot creeps by before ending abruptly in the middle of a battle between two characters who had only just entered the story and had very little connection to anything the main characters had been up to.
The action gets significant focus, but it’s hard to care about any of it. The enemies are primarily orks and their ilk who are entirely dehumanizing, being exclusively evil, stupid, ugly bastards, making their slaughter easy, morally uncomplicated, and unimportant to the plot. The stakes drop from low to nonexistent, in my view, around the time a main character takes a gunshot to the gut and is up and running in minutes without treatment. Why should I worry about the outcome of these fights at all after that?
( )

"The Yawning Gap" is an action-packed fantasy in a sci-fi setting. A spunky rag tag group go on an adventure to save the world. There is a lot of descriptive language that tends to be overused throughout the book. It is a very slow read. The extreme attention to detail paint vivid action scenes and really immerse the reader into the settings. There are also many unnecessary details and repeated rephrasing of the same thing within the same paragraph. There are many twists and turns througout the adventure, making it difficult for the reader to predict what will happen, which was very interesting. The climax of the story was an enjoyable twist that the reader definitely did not see coming at the beginning of the book like many in the fantasy genre. The ending is open-ended to set up for the next book, but does not leave off in a cliffhanger, which is pleasant after the rollercoaster of the main story. The characters each have flaws that kind of go away when they become part of the group. The changing dynamics are entertaining to follow as they become aware of their reality, while still believing in their own biases. Overall an enjoyable slow read that shows promise for the rest of the series that has yet to come. ( )

Cor is a resident of a village isolated from most of the rest of the world by invisible fields called boundaries who happens to find a gap that lets him out of the small area he’s known all of his life. Escaping from some vicious predators called peugs, he encounters a being called an Element that tells him the holes that occur in the boundaries are a sign that the Elements are dying and that all life will die if all of the Elements do. This Element then dies, becoming a relic known as a Fossil that can be used to create some magical effects. Embarking on a quest to revive the Elements, he encounters several allies, including three who have Fossils of their own and join his quest, and enemies with goals of their own.

This was just a mess, and I’d probably have given up on it if I hadn’t agreed to review it for Early Reviewers. The author tries for something of a poetic effect with their word choices, but this just results in incorrect phrasing, such as when the sun is described as being “low aloft the horizon”, and obscure words that make it hard to visualize what’s happening unless one happens to know what the welkin is or what color gules is. The effect is further weakened by use of words that give a very different feel in the same narrative voice, such as when Cor is described as considering “yoinking” something.

I also found the main characters somewhat unlikeable to varying degrees. In three of the four cases, this was a matter of one aspect that I consider to be negative but the author apparently doesn’t: one character is remarkably unaffected by having to kill intelligent beings (orks, who are an always chaotic evil race and not particularly bright), another calls a relatively minor character not human because he’d supported a usurper who’d overthrown the king, and a third decides that her belief system must have been wrong because it turned out that the person she’d supported who’d espoused the same beliefs didn’t actually follow them in practice. The fourth member of the group, however, deliberately plays the ditz and is as annoying as you might expect of someone who does that.

More than occasionally, the world is rather obviously manipulated to help things go the protagonists’ way. This can be as simple as a character winning an eating contest despite having eaten less than any of the other competitors because she’s the last one who hasn’t left the table or thrown up. In other cases, it results in things like orks always being competent enough to be an obstacle, but not enough to be a threat; when the protagonists are retaking the castle from the usurper, the orks are barely able to slow down a vastly outnumbered group, but they’re somewhat more effective when trying to stop the protagonists from escaping from the academy.

The politics are not subtle, and I strongly disagree with them, which did affect my rating. Basically, the story is very much pro-monarchy, anyone who claims to be supporting equality is either mistaken in their beliefs or evil and probably hypocritical, and things being peaceful is bad because the lack of any form of adventure leaves a void in many men that they’ll try to fill by eating.

On several occasions, I was knocked out of the story by characters either doing something unbelievably stupid or something happening that felt unrealistic even when taking the fantastic elements of the story into account. As an example of the former, one character is shot and seriously injured because the protagonists stop their attack on the usurper because he asks them to do so because he hasn’t finished justifying himself. For an example of the latter, the gunshot wound doesn’t slow the victim of it down after the initial shock of it, despite it not getting any treatment until a noticeable amount of time later; similarly, almost no injury or fatigue has any real effect on the protagonists.

Finally, the pacing is terrible. Long periods are spent dealing with the relatively minor antagonists of the usurper and the dean, while the major threat of the book doesn’t even show up until the last few chapters apart from one short chapter about twenty chapters earlier which has nothing to do with anything else in the story at that time. The big battle between this major antagonist and another character who’d also not appeared until then apart from the digression reduces all of the protagonists to being nothing more than onlookers to a conflict that neither they nor the reader knows much about the motives behind. Finally, the book doesn’t end so much as just stop, not just in mid-story, but in mid-scene as something starts happening to one of the protagonists that may or may not help deal with the immediate problem if there was one more chapter. ( )