Disclaimer: The author of this book approached me through TBRinder and offered me a digital ARC of the book for an honest review. I read through the entire thing and an honest review follows.

"First of all - this is not an exercise manual. It's a fantasy novel suffused with mysticism and mythology," says author Andrew Rowe on his website in a letter written to introduce The Yoga of Strength. Titles are important - as are covers. Together, they set a tone, even digitally, that needs to be met within the first few pages of a novel and then carried onward. Despite Rowe's claim that this is not an exercise manual, the word 'yoga' immediately brings to mind, depending on who you are, a wrinkled old Indian man contorted into inexplicable poses, or a room full of middle-aged fitness enthusiasts in very tight pants. Therefore, we are at odds when we open the book and find that it is basically a historical fiction novel set in medieval Europe that, over its course, reveals the existence of hidden magic unbeknownst to its populace. In a way, this is appropriate for a book that never really finds itself and does not seem to know exactly what it is.

Despite my initial misgivings about said title, and cover, I was drawn immediately into Rowe's world. I am a sucker for medieval settings, as any fantasy fan likely is, and Rowe paints an authentic portrait of medieval European life. His protagonist, Andrew Cardiff (and I won't get into the problems of naming your main character after yourself, aside from pointing out it out here), is not so likable. In fact, he is so unlikable from the start that it seems overwhelmingly obvious that this will be a character-building novel that will hopefully see him transform into someone we can root for and maybe even love. I regret that, for me, this never happened. He does change throughout the novel, but the impetus is never his. He is bombarded with outside forces that require him to morph into someone else, but the core of him never transforms away from the cynical child that we meet in the beginning. There are never any true moments of self-reflection, but rather manufactured instances where he is told that something is so and then absorbs this knowledge completely. His arc is so disappointing that it becomes the central focus of a book that could, with a fair amount of polish, be something worth reading. There are other characters in the book, but they are largely irrelevant and seem to exist only for Andrew's benefit, marking another problematic point in a novel full of them.

The plot of The Yoga of Strength does have good pacing and flows along quite well. It follows Cardiff as he travels the breadth of an imaginary Europe, and though it is fairly boilerplate in terms of fantasy fiction, this is not inherently bad. Cardiff has a true Hero's Journey in the sense that he leaves home, travels through the desert (or Hell), and then returns a changed man. Unfortunately this relatively simple tale is marred by both Cardiff's personality (because we never leave our protagonists point of view) and a slew of issues surrounding sexuality, gender, and simple human motivations. There is a groin obsession in The Yoga of Strength that is so prevalent that I don't think a page passes by without some mention of someones genitals or other gratuitous body parts. There are also prevailing attitudes about homosexuality that are approached with all the nuance of a wrecking ball and fall so far from the mark that I felt severely uncomfortable reading them. The same can be said for the narrative's view of women, which are only ever seen through the lens of 'mother' and 'sex-toy' (and sometimes this line gets blurry).

Rowe's writing is almost as mystifying as his plotting. There were times when I was genuinely impressed with a sentence or paragraph, and I think he does an excellent job at describing a setting. But there are sentences full of grammatical mistakes, and a mixture of purple prose and gutter-talk that mix as well as wine and motor oil. There are tense changes, often mid-sentence, that do not make grammatical sense, and there is even the notion that Andrew is telling this story to someone, suggested by the use of 'you' throughout, and by passages describing how he later would have no memory of such and such an instance, despite no mention of this being a "tale-told" novel in structure. Rowe's insistence on using dialect, and only ever when speaking through the voice of one of the novel's poor, ignoble characters, is another black mark that is hard to overlook. On the whole, the writing itself mars the plot because it sows confusion, despite the odd skillfully written sentence or description.

To be clear, I do not begin novels wanting to dislike them. I open up every book with the same wonder I did as a child, prepared to be transported to a mystical world and fall in love with characters of all shape and color. The Yoga of Strength, despite its apparent mission of trying to tell the story of a cynical boy who becomes a strong man, fails in its goal, and I actually feel that I am being generous in giving it even a 2/5. This is not a book I would recommend, and I had a hard time getting through to the end. I think that Andrew Rowe has talent as an author, but there is a lot of work that needs to go into a book like this before it should find its way into reader hands.