competencefantasy's Reviews (912)

I don't really feel qualified to be judging this, so I'll just say that while each image is visually interesting, this collection is more than the sum of its parts. It took me through an emotional progression and made me feel feelings, which was exactly what I needed when I picked it up.

This leans heavy on the historical fiction aspect and lighter on the fantasy elements than I had originally expected. That said, historical fiction needs to pay attention and become more like this, recognizing the wide variety of viewpoints that comes from having one's choice of temporal setting. I know of nothing else like this collection, and I wish I did.

I don't know what to do with this one. One the one hand, it's definitely passable, with solid unremarkable prose and decent pacing, provided you're willing to overlook a proper noun dump. I'm fairly sure the author has the research chops to be doing this, and the clarification sections at the end are a concept everyone should take a lesson from. However, aside from some sprinklings of philosophy, there's just nothing new here. It's the same brutal realism Romans set of tropes that I've seen dozens of times before, and the characterization isn't carried off well enough to make me care who's torturing whom.