The Shadow of What Was Lost (James Islington)

The Shadow of What Was Lost
The Licanius Trilogy, Book 1
James Islington
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Twenty years ago, the great Augurs - gifted with foresight and other marvelous abilities - fell from power when their prophecies failed. They were slain by the new king and his Loyalist forces, and their Gifted assistants bound by the Four Tenets of the Treaty. Today, all who wield Essence are marked and taken to the Tols... and those who do not or cannot abide by the strict rules are transformed into Shadows, stripped of power, the lowest of the low. Though it was within the lifetime of many, already the public chooses to forget the days when Augurs and Gifted were honored - and forget, too, the dangers they were meant to guard against, the Boundary to the north they were meant to reinforce.
Davian, Wirr, and Asha were all students at the same Tol, and thought they'd share a similar future... except maybe for Davian. His Essence woke after a brutal attack that left permanent scars - but he hasn't been able to reach it since, despite the lingering mark of the Gifted on his arm. With their trials coming soon, he's sure he'll fail and become another lowly Shadow, but he's too stubborn and honorable to try fleeing. The night before the trials, however, something attacks the school, leaving only the three alive, each set upon a different path to greater destinies than they'd ever dreamed... and greater dangers than they'd ever imagined.

REVIEW: The reviews looked good, and I've been feeling an epic fantasy itch lately, so this seemed like a decent choice. Unfortunately, when the cover reviewers rave how it's perfect for fans of Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson, I think they were being too accurate on the former and nowhere near the mark on the latter. This reads very much like the now-dated first book in Jordan's series and other older epic fantasy, with rather generic characters, a male- and white-heavy cast, and the concept of "sprawling epic" kicked over the line into "sprawling mess," not to mention Random Capitalizations of Various People or Things and the return of the wearisome "aesthetic apostrophe," or apostrophes stuck into names and terms to make them look exotic without actually serving a purpose. Add that to an overall sense that I'd read most of it before elsewhere, and I soon realized I was in for one heck of a slog.
Now, I'm not new to the epic fantasy genre. I've read Tolkien, Williams, Martin, and Sanderson, among others. I know such books often take some time to establish a feel, and for names to sort themselves out; that's part of the attraction, the immersion into a full and wonder-filled world. Here, even by the end, I had only mentally sorted about half of the many names, places, eras, entities, and terms Islington threw at me and evidently expected me to keep straight. Too many were brought up with minimal relevance to the plot or the characters, and too many had a similar feel, meaning I had to constantly hold myself up trying to remember if a particular name was someone new or someone I should remember, or even whether they were a person or a place or a city - and even then it wasn't always clear. The capital city has about three different terms to describe various parts of it, all of which tended to be adrift in mental white space for lack of orientation. It was all very distancing, especially as Islington works hard to clutter the plot with glimpses of new tidbits and yet another race or character or ability or twists that were meant to be intriguing. Oh, and there's an unsubtle religion insertion that kicks in roughly halfway through. And the titular "Licanius"? It barely even appears in the storyline, and though it's evidently important enough to name the trilogy after, I still couldn't tell you its significance beyond an overhyped, underused Macguffin. This is what ultimately cost it a half-star; I should not have been that lost that far into the story. (Well, that and too many said-bookisms and other style irritants that just got under my skin after a while... and if that kind of thing's bugging me, something's clearly gone wrong with my suspension of disbelief.)
That said, there are a few nice ideas and scenes glimmering here and there, and some potentially intriguing characters. There are, unfortunately, many more ideas, scenes, and characters that feel stripped from other fantasy works with the serial runes barely filed down. While many people evidently liked it, and I suspect things pick up in future volumes, this simply failed to provide the immersive epic fantasy experience I'd been looking for, and my reading pile's too deep (not to mention my interest level too low, and confusion level too high) to pursue this trilogy.

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